Essays as a Genre, Teaching Technique and Pedagogical Measurement Tool

In this article, an essay is considered in three aspects: as a literary genre, a method of teaching academic writing and a test to measure learning outcomes. As a literary genre, the boundaries of an essay are too vague to tell an "essay" from a "not essay" among small literary forms. Both types of literary pieces can perform the functions of description, narration and reasoning. It is shown in the article that the development of the author's thesis in the chain of logically constructed judgments can be considered a specific feature of the essay, unlike a chain of statements in a discourse. As a teaching method, an essay is a complex subject of teaching and learning. To teach students to write a good essay, it is not enough to provide them with the necessary vocabulary stock and solid grammatical skills together with the knowledge of correct punctuation. The task also is to develop intellectual functions with a high level of logically arranged critical thinking, in addition to the habit of writing in a suggested format. In this paper, the focus is put on teaching essay writing as logically organized reasoning, because violation of logic in the text of an essay is what often causes communication failures of the authors. The features of "big and small logic of an essay" are considered and examples from classroom experience are given. In the published research, an essay is also treated as a tool for pedagogical measurement of students' communicative competence. The "validity" and "reliability" of an essay are critically assessed as of a didactic test. The validity of an essay, i.e. a clear statement of what is being tested in the task, seems insufficient, since all the components of communicative competence, as well as background knowledge and personal maturity are being tested together. In addition, the task performed at the exam in a limited time, diagnoses not only the level of communicative competence in the language studied, but also the properties of the candidate's central nervous system. The dilemma in solving the issue of essay reliability as a language test is shown. On the one hand, a "closed" testing approach with assessment of the formal characteristics of an essay text increases the reliability of the assessment, but shifts the focus from content to form. On the other hand, the essay, as an "open" test, directs the attention of evaluators to the content, reducing the likelihood that the scoring by different experts will reliably coincide. With the "fuzzy logic" and subjective boundaries between "excellent" - "good" - "satisfactory" - "bad", the reliability of open-ended essay-writing test goes down. The paper proposes criteria for evaluating essays, provides the results of quantitative and qualitative research, contains materials of experiential learning.

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