This morning, I’ve had two terrible mishaps with email. The first was finding an important message from a reader buried in my spam folder. It was a lovely note, and included a question about some writing material I produced about six years ago. The second mistake was then accidentally emptying the spam folder before replying to the message. Oops! Undeterred, I decided to act on the message and dig out the material in question.

The reader was asking about a learner-friendly version of the Cambridge B1 writing assessment scale which I shared after a conference workshop. I’ve lived in three different towns since then, as well as suffering the death of a laptop, so alas the material appeared lost.

The material obviously had its merits, and it got me thinking about why I was no longer using this method with my own learners. I could vaguely recall what the learner-friendly scales looked like, and felt inspired to create a new version which I would want to use with my own learners.

This is the result. I’ve adapted the basic design of the assessment scales from the Preliminary for Schools handbook, but have simplified several aspects to make it much simpler. Then, I set about rewording the descriptors for each of the scales, thinking about how to frame these in as positive a light as possible. Finally, I produced some hand-drawn emojis to use instead of marks. Learners are often too concerned with what they got rather than how they did or what they can do better. This sheet aims to encourage more of the latter.

The boxes at the bottom give the learner a few more cues to planning, writing, and checking their writing, as well as giving the teacher space to provide feedback. Notice that this feedback is framed as next time, why don’t you… as a way of encouraging teachers to give feedback that is actionable and useful for the next writing task, rather than focusing on what the learner did or didn’t do in the current one.

If you find this useful, or know a colleague who would, please consider sharing this page with them.