Writing assessment in higher education

The importance of appropriate assessment methods for academic writing skills in higher education has received increasing attention in SLA research in recent years. Despite this, there is still relatively little understanding of how academic writing skills develop at the most advanced levels of proficiency. Use of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is one way to ensure the comparability of findings across research efforts and continue to move the field forward. This paper presents some key concepts and definitions from the fields of SLA and advancedness research, language assessment and corpus linguistics and introduces several papers that address writing assessment within the context of higher education.