This study is a result of trying to grasp what teachers look at when they assess writing. The

motive is to better understand what goes on inside a teacher’s mind when correcting a written

piece of work and to raise the level of awareness of what teachers actually do. Background

information as to what the teachers support their assessment on and how they acquired their

“correcting skills” is also treated. The study brings up both what teachers say and what

teachers do. It is an exploratory and open ended investigation. To perform this exploration a

qualitative method is used. Interviews with open questions and observations of the assessment

situation with think aloud protocols are performed. Examples of the teachers’ real life

marking in students written texts are also considered.

The findings show that teachers possess an intuition based on knowledge which has been

constructed by themselves and that they cannot depict easily. Their own awareness of what

they do seems to be mixed with what they would like to do at occasions. Linguistic topics

such as morphology, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, spelling and idiomaticity are considered

by both teachers showing that surface errors are of importance. Coherence and thematic

treatment are also taken into consideration when teachers assess but the way they value these

aspects together with views on what writing is, what communication is together with other

possible choices shows that correction and assessing is highly subjective. In addition, this

study points at the possibility that a teacher progresses from analytic to holistic with time and

that writing as a process is more valid when a teacher becomes more experienced.