Diagnostic assessment of written accuracy: New directions for written corrective feedback in secondary writing classrooms

There has been a proliferation of research on focused written corrective feedback in recent years. The bulk of this research, however, has adopted experimental/quasi-experimental designs, targeted at a limited number of error categories, hence neglecting teachers’ authentic needs in the classroom. The present study seeks to investigate how diagnostic writing assessment can be used to enhance focused WCF practice in authentic L2 writing classrooms. This chapter, part of a larger study, is intended to shed methodological light on how a diagnostic writing assessment conducted in class by teachers can be applied to inform systematic focused WCF practice in authentic L2 writing classrooms. The findings show that there is a great variation of error density across the student texts, with learners of higher proficiency level having lower error density and writing longer texts. Regarding error frequency and gravity, students tend to make frequent errors in verb tense, word choice and punctuation, and gravity of errors falls on sentence structure, expression and word choice. We propose a general set of pedagogical procedures for teachers interested in carrying out diagnostic assessment of students’ writing, and call for the need of diagnostic writing assessment to ensure a systematic focused WCF practice. Copyright © 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG.