Both of us were drawn into the writing assessment field initially through our lived experiences as schoolteachers. We worked in radically different contexts – Martin was head of a languages department and teacher of French and German in the late 1990s in the UK, and David was a Grade 12 teacher of Academic English in Alberta, Canada, at the turn of the twenty-first century. In both these contexts, the traditional direct test of writing – referred to, for example, as the ‘timed impromptu writing test’ (Weigle, 2002, p. 59) or the ‘snapshot approach’ (Hamp-Lyons & Kroll, 1997, p. 18) – featured significantly in our practices, albeit in very different ways. This form of writing assessment still holds considerable sway across the globe. For us, however, it provoked early questions and concerns around the consequential and ethical aspects of writing assessment.

我们俩最初都是通过我们作为学校教师的生活经历而被吸引到写作评估领域的。我们在截然不同的环境中工作——马丁是 20 世纪 90 年代末英国语言系主任兼法语和德语教师，而大卫是 20 世纪 20 年代初加拿大艾伯塔省 12 年级的学术英语教师。第一世纪。在这两种情况下，传统的直接写作测试——例如被称为“定时即兴写作测试”（Weigle，2002，第 59 页）或“快照方法”（Hamp-Lyons & Kroll，1997，第 18 页）——尽管方式非常不同，但在我们的实践中具有重要意义。这种写作评估形式在全球仍然具有相当大的影响力。然而，对我们来说，它引发了关于撰写评估的后果和道德方面的早期问题和担忧。