Rubrics are essential tools for all language teachers in this age of communicative and task-based teaching and assessment--tools that allow us to efficiently communicate to our students what we are looking for in the productive language abilities of speaking and writing and then effectively assess those abilities when the time comes for grading students, giving them feedback, placing them into new courses, and so forth. This book provides a wide array of ideas, suggestions, and examples (mostly from Maori, Hawaiian, and Japanese language assessment projects) to help language educators effectively develop, use, revise, analyze, and report on rubric-based assessments. Contents include: Section I: Introduction: (1) Introduction to Rubric-Based Assessment (James Dean Brown); Section II: Developing, Using, and Analyzing Rubric-Based Assessment: (2) Developing Rubrics for Language Assessment (James Dean Brown); (3) Assessing Student Language Performance: Types and Uses of Rubrics (Larry Davis and Kimi Kondo-Brown); (4) Issues in Analyzing Rubric-Based Results (James Dean Brown and Catherine (Katarina) Anne Edmonds; Section III: Case Studies in Asian and Pacific Languages: (5) Maori Language Proficiency in Writing: The Kaiaka Reo Year Eight Writing Test (Catherine (Katarina) Anne Edmonds; (6) The Hawaiian Oral Language Assessment: Development and Effectiveness of the Scoring Rubric (Alohalani Housman, Kaulana Dameg, Mahealani Kobashigawa, and James Dean Brown); (7) Rubric-Based Scoring of Japanese Essays: The Effects on Generalizability of Numbers of Raters and Categories (James Dean Brown and Kimi Kondo-Brown); and Section IV: Conclusion: (8) Conclusions on Rubric-Based Assessment (James Dean Brown).