Academic writing and education in foreign and second languages both have lengthy histories. Their histories have diverged but also intersected. Matsuda (Reference Matsuda, Matsuda and Silva2005), for example, described the convergence in policies that led to a distinctive discipline of ‘L2 writing’ in higher education in the U.S.A. during the latter part of the 20th century. Assessment is a key point of their mutual intersection. Approaches to language testing that involve writing for academic purposes – or conversely, writing assessments that involve second or foreign languages – have appeared at certain times, supported by particular policies, rationales, and modes of inquiry or reasoning. The present timeline focuses on the development and elaboration of these rationales and research about them.
Theearly history linking writing assessment and language education predates existing documentation. Nonetheless, it is evident that, long before any explicit surviving records, many conventions persisting today in ordinary practices of writing assessment in second or foreign languages were already well established in education and other institutions (Kelly Reference Kelly1969; Spolsky Reference Spolsky1995), including composing or translating set texts, a teacher's or examiner's evaluation of the quality of that performance, and students' subsequent revisions of their texts.
Since the early 20th century, many progressions and differentiations have appeared. My selection of notable publications below aims to represent these historical trends. I observe five recurring themes, each of which is marked by capital letters A–E in the final-column annotations to each publication:
A Broadening of the contexts to which assessment has been applied.
B Concerns for the validity of assessments, particularly scoring methods and the evidence and arguments to support inferences made from writing assessments.
C Congruence and conflict between the purposes of assessment and of education in general.
D Debates over appropriate or variable standards of writing quality.
E An expanding repertoire of research methods and technologies to improve and validate L2 writing tests.
I constructed this timeline and its components by consulting key sources (cited below) and my previous searches, notably in Cumming (Reference Cumming, Clapham and Corson1997, Reference Cumming, Shohamy and Hornberger2008) and Leki, Cumming & Silva (Reference Leki, Cumming and Silva2008). Other, more extensive, historical studies were also helpful, particularly Spolsky (Reference Spolsky1995), but also Kelly (Reference Kelly1969), Barnwell (Reference Barnwell1996), Hamp-Lyons (Reference Hamp-Lyons2002), and Weir & Milanovic (Reference Weir and Milanovic2003). My citation of sources should be consistent with these previous analyses, though my selection and interpretations are personal. Undoubtedly a bias appears towards the literature in English and the educational contexts in North America and parts of Europe or Asia with which I am most familiar. However, I hope that the values I have expressed do not, for these reasons, impose an unduly hierarchical viewpoint on situations that must, around the world, necessarily have their own local realizations and priorities (cf. Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah2005).
Alister Cumming is Professor and Head of the Modern Language Centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. He conducts research and teaches courses on writing in second languages, language assessment, and research methods. In addition to many articles in journals, book chapters, and research reports, his recent publications include Goals for academic writing (John Benjamins, 2006) and, with Ilona Leki and Tony Silva, A synthesis of research on second language writing in English (Routledge, 2008). He currently chairs the TOEFL Committee of Examiners at Educational Testing Service and serves as Executive Director of Language Learning, a journal he edited in the 1990s.
