Evaluation of Iranian EFL students' performance at different stages of writing process

Writing which was once considered as the major expertise of the privileged and well educated individuals, has become an essential skill for people at all levels of education in today's global community. It is usually used in many communicative activities, such as composing academic essays, business reports, letters, reporting analyses of current events for newspapers or/and web pages, e-mails, or/and short off-line messages in widely used messenger programs. Therefore, the ability to write expressively and effectively allows individuals from different cultures and backgrounds to communicate their thoughts and their needs. In this study, the researchers attempt to find out whether there is any feature in each stage that characterize the students’ performance in that stage and could be used as a basis for the design of a scoring scale for that very stage and to determine how far the scale descriptors can produce consistent results. The participants for the present study were 210 university students majoring in English translation at Central Tehran and Karaj Branches of Islamic Azad University. Based on the collected data from the students writing samples, the researchers designed a rating scale including four subscales namely, generating ideas, outlining, drafting and editing, for each stages of the writing process. The high inter-rater reliability of the obtained scores (0.895) indicated that the rating scales could produce consistent results. Moreover, results of the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that there was no significant difference among the ratings created by the three raters.