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The purpose of the present study was to develop appropriate scoring scales for each of the defined stages of the writing process, and also to determine to what extent these scoring scales can reliably and validly assess the performances of EFL learners in an academic writing task. Two hundred and two students’ writing samples were collected after a step-by-step process oriented essay writing instruction. Four stages of writing process – generating ideas (brainstorming), outlining (structuring), drafting, and editing – were operationally defined. Each collected writing sample included student writers’ scripts produced in each stage of the writing process. Through a detailed analysis of the collected writing samples by three raters, the features which highlighted the strong or weak points in the student writers’ samples were identified, and then the student writers’ scripts were categorized into four levels of performance. Then, descriptive statements were made for each identified feature to represent the specified level of performance. These descriptive statements, or descriptors, formed rating scales for each stage of the writing process. Finally, four rating sub-scales, namely brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and editing were designed for the corresponding stages of the writing process. Subsequently, the designed rating scales were used by the three raters to rate the 202 collected writing samples. The scores thus obtained were put to statistical analyses. The high inter-rater reliability estimate (0.895) indicated that the rating scales could produce consistent results. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that there was no significant difference among the ratings created by the three raters. Factor analysis suggested that at least three constructs, –language knowledge, planning ability, and idea creation ability – could possibly underlie the variables measured by the rating scale.  

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The current literature on second language pedagogy promotes a return to some form-focused instruction where collaborative tasks are encouraged.  This study reports on the impact of form-focused instruction and peer revision (text-editing collaborative task)on subjects’ final performance in second language writing in two rhetorical modes of narrationand exposition produced by 60 junior and senior students of English divided equally into the controlled and experimental groups. The results confirmed that form-focused instruction has a better impact on simple than complex grammatical elements. The study also confirmed the significant effect of the form-focused instruction on the inter-lingual errors, and it revealed some positive effects of collaborative task especially on more proficient learners. The findings also disclosed that different processes are involved in editing as well as reconstructing expository and narrative genres. The fact that writing narrative texts was more demanding than the exposition for the learners implies the complexity of this genre in terms of cognitive processing and linguistic presentation, hence a more involvement of writing teachers on this genre is recommended.