Introduction

Writing is not an easy endeavor. It’s a complex cognitive activity in which

students are required to pay attention to sentence structure, vocabulary ,punctuation,

spelling and letter formation. In general, the quality of writing has deteriorated

among secondary students in literary and scientific streams.

Language testing is an important element in the assessment process in the

writing classroom. The purpose of the composition task is important in deciding

which scale should be chosen to motivate and guide our student to learn. It is

therefore the teacher’s responsibility to find a reliable method of assessing the

writing ability of his students.

The method adopted for scoring composition can affect the accurate

assessment of writing. The assessment of students’ writing can greatly influence

students’ attitudes for future learning because learners can be easily confused

by unclear, vague or ambiguous responses. This makes students become

frustrated with their writing progress and their preparation for their examinations.

Alternatively, students can be positively motivated if the assessments given to

their written work can help predict their actual performance in examinations.

Unfortunately, a clear set of universal guidelines does not exist that guarantees such

a supportive and positive experience for all students..

Since objective and reliable scoring strategies remain the more basic issue,

especially for writing composition, this study attempts to investigate closely one

method of marking composition, namely the analytic method. The questions guiding

this study assume the unreliability of the holistic assessment. Hence, the present study

aims at finding a method that gives fair and reliable feedback to the teachers and

students by hypothesizing the ability of the analytic scoring method of assessing

writing tasks as effectively and as objectively as possible.

It also examines the possibility of using the scores of the analytic scoring

method for pedagogical purposes . One of these purposes is to discover students’

points of weaknesses and strengths and to remedy any weakness students may have

and to enforce their points of strength through feedback.