Abstract:

Assessing learners’ written performances as objectively as possible is one of the goals of communicative language testing. It is more challenging once the assessors are learners’ teachers and their judgements will influence the total scores of their students in high-stakes examinations. Currently, Slovakia offers external school-leaving examinations in English at three CEFR levels. However, these high-stakes examinations consist of testing receptive skills and language in use externally; and the total scores include the scores related to testing writing. The tasks are presented externally but assessed internally. To foster reliable and valid assessment, it seemed appropriate to start training student teachers to become knowledgeable and skilful in applying specific scoring criteria, which contributes to their reliability in assessing learner work.

The study focuses on training student teachers to use analytic marking scales to get detailed information about learners’ performances in different aspects of writing. After introducing general procedures related to reading and applying analytic scoring, first trainees’ votes were counted. Having been explained particular descriptors used in the marking scales, the student teachers were asked to judge the same performance again, and the second round judgements were questioned. The discussion during which student teachers had to justify their decisions linking the learners’ performances to the descriptors made some student teachers reconsider their assessment before the third round of judgements was organised.

All the achieved data will be presented and commented on alongside the student teachers’ ideas referring to their experience. The questions about designing tasks and scoring procedures raised during discussions will be mentioned. Due to the pandemic, high-stakes examinations were cancelled in two previous years. This year’s re-introduction of the language school examinations was accompanied by students’ protests asking for their cancellation or modification, which will be discussed and commented on in line with the official decision and its reasoning.

Keywords:

Analytic rating scales, training, applying descriptors.