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Showing posts from November 8, 2015

On Assumptions of (un)fairness in Writing Assessment

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Auckland, New Zealand I'm heading off tomorrow to Auckland, New Zealand to present at the Symposium on Second Language Writing conference at AUT University. My colleague, Kelvin Keown, and I will present an on-going study that we're doing that looks at the effects of the material conditions of multilingual writers in upper-division W-courses (writing in the major courses) on their use of feedback on their writing. Perhaps on my return, I'll give a bit of that presentation here and the feedback we received from those who participated in our session. For the rest of this post, I'd like to pose a few pedagogical questions to writing teachers, questions I've been thinking about recently while doing workshops and talks at various places on antiracist classroom writing assessment practices. At such events, I urge writing teachers to consider ways to explicitly cultivate antiracist agendas in their writing assessments. I explain the two main assumptions a teacher mi