The use of coursebook was found to be a problem since the assessment tasks
were provided in the coursebook to assess students’ writing skill without
considering their learning needs and capabilities in receiving the materials. In fact,
there are various types of assessment tasks in writing that teachers can use to assess
students’ writing skill according to their abilities. Therefore, the present study aims
1) to identify and explain the assessment tasks used by the teachers to assess the
writing skill of junior high school students and 2) to investigate students’ perception
about the assessment tasks in writing given by the teachers.
This study used descriptive qualitative method that described natural
phenomenon in a particular research field. MTs Hidayatullah Bahaur, Central
Kalimantan, was chosen as the research setting. Two English teachers and ten
students of class VIII at MTs Hidayatullah Bahaur were involved in this study.
Some different techniques of data collection were used, namely observation,
interview, and documentation.
The results can be concluded into two main points as indicated by the
research objectives. 1) The English teachers involved in the present study only used
two categories of assessment tasks to assess students' writing abilities, namely
imitative writing in the form of hand-writing letters, words, and punctuation and
spelling tasks and intensive writing in the form of grammatical transformation
tasks, picture-cued tasks, vocabulary assessment tasks, ordering tasks, short-answer
and sentence-completion tasks. 2) Through the results of interviews with several
student representatives, it was found that in general the quality of the assessment
tasks given by the teachers was very good. However, the important point they
emphasized several times was the teacher’s active role in explaining how to
complete the assessment task. Therefore, it is important to have well-designed
assessment tasks, but it is more important that students could understand what the
tasks mean so they could finish the tasks correctly