Developing Writing Skills : Insights from Content- and Grammar-Based Assessment and Feedback

The ability to communicate one’s ideas and opinions clearly is of vital importance in today’s age of unpredictability and complexity. From a perspective of English writing pedagogy, university students need to be equipped with writing skills that represent their thought and ideas with clarity. However, it is doubtful whether English writing instruction in Japan, which has conventionally focused on grammatical assessment and feedback, has adequately helped students improve their writing skills to reflect their thoughts clearly. Therefore, this study attempts to examine the impact of assessment and feedback on students’ writing performance by dividing 69 students into two groups. Group A students were provided with grammatical and content assessment and feedback for their essays, while Group B students were given only content assessment and feedback. The results showed that both groups performed almost equally in grammatical assessment while Group B fared better in content assessment. This could be an indication that Group A students disturbed their attention between grammar and content, resulting in low assessment in content. Meanwhile, Group B students were successful in terms of content assessment while maintaining a certain level of grammatical accuracy. This outcome indicates the need for reconsidering assessment and feedback strategies to help students develop better writing skills for self-representation instead of continuing to emphasize traditional grammar-focused assessment and feedback.