Role of assessment in second language writing research and pedagogy

Research into second language writing has developed in depth and scope over the past few decades. Researchers have shown growing interest in new approaches to the teaching and assessing of writing. The provision of diagnostic and/or (automated) corrective feedback (Lee & Coniam, Citation2013; Liu & Kunnan, Citation2016), predicting writers’ ability using psycholinguistic features of their essays (Riazi, Citation2016) and rater performance (Schaefer, Citation2008) are but a few major research streams in second language writing. Such new approaches have been discussed heatedly in the scholarly literature, but there remains a need to investigate new issues emerging from these fields in different environments. Specifically, the role of assessment in writing, the validity of the uses and interpretations of qualitative feedback and scores, and the effectiveness of genre-based approaches to writing continue to be major causes of concerns for practitioners and researchers alike.