<p>Research Language Skills Assessment for Postgraduate Students</p><p>Performance bands: Writing</p><p>The student should exhibit the following general performance in the writing test:</p><p>1 Content is fully comprehensive. Organisation, cohesion and coherence are highly effective and well achieved. Register is fully appropriate to the genre of thesis/research paper writing. Grammatical structures and vocabulary are virtually error free. Range of grammatical structures and vocabulary is entirely natural and fully appropriate to the genre. Adherence to academic writing conventions is fully achieved. </p><p>2 Content is comprehensive. Organisation, cohesion and coherence are almost always highly effective and well achieved. Register is appropriate to the genre of thesis/research paper writing. Grammatical structures and vocabulary are mostly error free. Range of grammatical structures and vocabulary is natural and appropriate to the genre. Adherence to academic writing conventions is well achieved.</p><p>3 Content is generally comprehensive. Organisation, cohesion and coherence are effective and well achieved. Register is generally appropriate to the genre of thesis/research paper writing. Grammatical structures and vocabulary contain some non-intrusive errors. Range of grammatical structures and vocabulary is generally natural and appropriate to the genre. Adherence to academic writing conventions is generally well achieved.</p><p>4 Content may be limited in its comprehensiveness. Organisation, cohesion and coherence are sometimes ineffective. Register is sometimes inappropriate to the genre of thesis/research paper writing. Grammatical structures and vocabulary contain some errors which impede communication. Range of grammatical structures and vocabulary is somewhat limited and/or inappropriate for the genre. Adherence to academic writing conventions is generally achieved.</p><p>5 Content is often not comprehensive. Organisation, cohesion and coherence are often ineffective. Register contains many inappropriacies for the genre of thesis/research paper writing or lacks flexibility. Grammatical structures and vocabulary contain frequent inaccuracies and errors which impede communication. Range of grammatical structures and vocabulary is unnaturally limited and/or inappropriate for the genre. Adherence to academic writing conventions shows limitations. 26 August, 2005</p>