The Impact of Rating Methods and Task Types on EFL Learners' Writing Scores

The difficulty of assessing the writing skill is well known. Different testing facets seem to affect the result of assessing the writing skill. In addition to the writer’s ability, the topic of the writing task, and methods of rating may contribute to the writer’s score. In this study, 50 EFL learners wrote four different types of writing tasks (convincing, describing, instructing, and explaining), and these tasks were scored by three raters using two scoring methods: holistic and analytic. The Repeated-Measures ANOVA and variance components analyses of these ratings illustrated that the rating methods and their interaction significantly affected EFL learners’ writing scores.