Assessing Students’ Writing via an SFL-Based Functional Language Analysis: Why and How

Writing assessment is a crucial practice in the success of teaching and learning a specific genre. The relevant literature highlights that assessing the written literacy levels of students should be well-designed in order to meet their learning needs and achieve clearly articulated goals. It also points out that there are several unaddressed issues in the existing approaches to writing assessment. Accordingly, this review paper aims to discuss some of those issues, in particular, those around the functional language analysis method, which rests upon Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). One of the concerns in such an approach is what the potential limitations might be when using only purely quantitative analysis, which simply calculates the frequency of a given linguistic resource in a student’s writing to investigate his/her development. This review article maintains that quantitative analysis alone will offer limited insights into students’ written literacy development. Therefore, it suggests employing a linguistically-observant method based on concrete stylistic evidence that considers both quantitative analyses and qualitative observations for judging written literacy levels. It concludes that this combination will prove effective for offering useful insights into writing assessment and making well-founded conclusions on how to track and gauge written literacy development.