6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

Example 6.2: Writing task
Write an essay comparing and contrasting the views of Freud and 
Jung on the function of dreams.
In a language class, the teacher may have assigned this task (Example 
6.2) in order to fi nd out whether students are able to organise an 
essay of comparison. The focus would be on organisation and 
cohesion. Formative feedback would focus on these issues and any 
misrepresentation of the theories of the two authors in the students’ 
essays might not be taken into account. The students’ knowledge of 
psychological theories would not be part of the construct and 
differences in performance attributable to different levels of 
knowledge of the work of Freud and Jung would be considered as 
construct irrelevant. In fact, it would probably be sensible to provide 
the assessees with information about the two writers to make sure 
that all would all have the background knowledge needed to write 
the essay.
On the other hand, if the task was part of an assessment for 
prospective teaching assistants working in the psychology department, 
understanding of the psychological theories and the quality of the 
arguments would probably be given much greater importance. It might 
be considered as part of the construct of the assessment. In practice, 
rating scales used in tests of languages for specifi c purposes often 
include a ‘task fulfi 
lment’ criterion that refl 
ects the ‘strong’ 
interpretation, but greater weight is generally given to other ‘weak’ 
linguistic criteria (Douglas, 2000).

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