The present book aim to highlight one important issue before any high school teacher's eyes: it is necessary to understand the purpose of testing in high schools. What is the role of high school tests? Should they be considered as real tests? Or can they be perhaps best regarded as a ceremony, a cathartic ritual to be undergone alone with other examinations of this type before holiday? We hope that book may lead teachers to focus more on testing procedures as a complementary step in language learning and teaching. This will help them to see that everyone has areas of strength and areas of challenge, and that it is worthwhile to use every opportunity, even the testing sessions, for improving the learners achievements in language proficiency.

The role of writing in social interactions is becoming more and more evident in modern communities. The increasing use of personal computers and the rapid growth of the Internet have emphasized the importance of writing skill among the four skills. As a result, the ability to speak and write a second language is becoming widely recognized as an important skill for educational, business, and personal reasons. The use of performance assessment as a measure of writing language skills in English as a second or foreign language has become a common practice all over the world. This book provides an assessment model that can help teachers to observe and evaluate student writers' performances during the writing process. We hope that applying such a model for writing assessment can provide teaching practitioners with a better diagnostic tool for the evaluation of learners who are more likely to perform differently in different stages of the writing process.