摘要：Even though many writing scales have been developed, instructors, educational administrators or researchers may have to develop new scales to fit their specific testing situation. In so-doing, one of the initial steps to be taken is to determine the evaluative criteria on which the scale is supposed to be based. As a part of a project that was proposed to develop a genre-based writing scale, a survey was carried out to investigate Malaysian lecturers’ views on the evaluative criteria to be considered in evaluating argumentative essays. For this purpose, a group of English as a Second Language (ESL) lecturers (n=88) were administered a questionnaire. The subscales of organization, content and language skills were recommended by factor analysis. A fourth subscale, task fulfillment, was added as a result of the qualitative analysis of the data. The findings can be useful for language teaching or assessing purposes. ra ,c ??o?rvation with the causal-comparative study between treatment group and control group. The result shows that a majority of students with TOA improved their oral English learning more than those with Traditional Teaching Method (TTM). It also finds that TOA is able to motivate the students to speak in class and a certain percentage of students can overcome their psychological problems in expressing ideas. The findings are that TOA affects students’ achievement in a favorable way which provides some theoretical, methodological and practical implications.
