A Comparative Study On The Scoring Rubrics Of English Writing Tests

As one of the four competences in English,writing has been attached great importance in recent years.Apart from making it an important curriculum in the classroom,writing is also widely used in various English examinations including CET-4(College English Test Band Four),CET-6(College English Test Band Six),TEM-4(Test for English Majors Band Four)and TEM-8(Test for English Majors Band Eight)in China,IETLS(International English Language Testing System)and TOFEL(The Test of English as a Foreign Language)in western countries,and thus how to improve students' writing ability has been a headache for both teachers and students for a long time.Among all the ways out of the difficulty,writing rubrics has attained a great attention for it not only provides students with a clear understanding of what is expected of them,but also allows teachers to accommodate and differentiate for heterogeneous classes by offering a range of quality levels.To offer guidance for students to write a satisfactory composition and ultimately improve their writing ability,this thesis conducts a comparative study on the writing rubrics of CET,TEM,IELTS and TOEFL by presenting their requirements on the external text features and internal development,trying to find out the differences and similarities among them and thus gain some insight into the practicable and relative more comprehensive writing rubrics both for teachers and students in writing class.Through comparison and analysis,this thesis has several findings: 1)Students taking IELTS and TOEFL own more freedom in deciding the layout of their writing compared with those who sit CET and TEM,but since the layout ensures the legibility of writing,students should pay more attention to it as is required in TEM.2)General speaking,the whole length of writing has been paid most attention compared with the length of paragraphs and length of sentences in total written production as can be seen from the writing rubrics of CET,TEM,IELTS and TOEFL.3)CET focuses more on the correct use of vocabulary while TEM,IELTS and TOEFL attach great importance to both the correctness and richness of vocabulary.4)Both the writing rubrics of CET and TOEFL are vague in their requirements about sentence structure and grammar while TEM and IELTS highly value the correctness and richness of grammar and structures.5)In terms of writing style,writing rubrics of CET,TEM,IELTS are more appropriate to augmentative writing while writing rubrics of TOEFL seem vague enough to cover all kinds of writing styles.6)In terms of essay structure,writing rubrics of TEM strive to test the performance of students' writing from several aspects as logicality,relevance,clarity,consistency and support.Besides,writing rubrics of IELTS have provided concrete descriptive explanation concerning essay structure which can be consulted by students.7)Writing rubrics of CET mainly examine to what extent students are able to stick to the topic,but TEM,TOEFL and IELTS centers on the development of topic and IELTS is the most detailed one in its description on topic development.8)Unity is only mentioned in the writing rubrics of TOEFL and it is not specifically clarified.9)The coherence and logicality of paragraphs and sentences have been attached great importance in the writing rubrics of all tests,but only IELTS offers further explanation on how to be coherent while writing.