EFL Teachers’ Assessment Literacy: A Contextualized Measure of Assessment Theories and Skills

Abstract

Teachers from different sectors of education have always been involved in the process of assessing learners’ academic performance. In the language teaching discipline, this has highlighted the significance of language assessment literacy (LAL), reflecting its significance to language teachers across various settings. In the wake of recent theoretical bourgeoning, development of a contextualized framework that proves helpful in conceptualization and measurement of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ LAL is required. To this aim, the present study gained insights from Fulcher’s (2012) LAL framework into validation and examination of a LAL scale that could be considered for its applicability and usefulness as a LAL measure and help EFL teachers self-evaluate their LAL levels (in particular, their LAL theoretical and practical components). For this purpose, a mixed-methods approach was used to synthesize interview data from six national and international experts with questionnaire data obtained from Iranian EFL teachers (N=173) to gauge their assessment theories and skills and bear evidence in support of the reliability, validity and utilization of the measure put forth. The study rounds out with the significance of teachers’ LAL in teachers’ pedagogy, with finally presenting theoretical and practical implications of the obtained evidence for educational research and practices.

Exploring teachers’ attitudes and self-efficacy beliefs for implementing student self-assessment of English as a foreign language writing

“…In view of the above multiple challenges, it seems that the participating teachers, regardless of the length of their teaching career, have not indicated a readiness to implement student self-assessment of writing in their classrooms. Student-centered assessment approaches have been advocated on the national policy level, however, our findings highlight teachers’ need of intensive professional support from their universities to improve their assessment literacy ( Mohammadkhah et al, 2022 ; Takrouni and Assalahi, 2022 ), for example, getting familiar with the rationale and design of self-assessment activities so that their confidence in implementing self-assessment in the writing class could be enhanced ( Wu et al, 2021a ).…”

“…Student-centered assessment approaches have been advocated on the national policy level, however, our findings highlight teachers' need of intensive professional support from their universities to improve their assessment literacy (Mohammadkhah et al, 2022;Takrouni and Assalahi, 2022), for example, getting familiar with the rationale and design of self-assessment activities so that their confidence in implementing self-assessment in the writing class could be enhanced (Wu et al, 2021a).…”

“…How EFL teachers in Chinese universities perceive self-assessment of writing and how self-efficacious they are to implement self-assessment practices are questions that urgently need investigation because teachers' perceptions and self-efficacy beliefs could greatly influence the assessment approaches (Looney et al, 2018) and the quality of language education in Chinese tertiary settings. Further, it is expected that findings of this study could help English writing teachers understand the current uptake of selfassessment practices and, extrapolating from these data, we argue that EFL teachers' assessment literacy development serves as a prerequisite for successful implementation of studentcentered assessment in classrooms (Mohammadkhah et al, 2022;Tajeddin et al, 2022;).…”

“…The second challenge concerns teachers’ lack of assessment literacy, including a limited understanding of assessment purposes and value, and mastery of assessment knowledge, which leads to teachers’ uncertainties about how to enact self-assessment appropriately ( Mohammadkhah et al, 2022 ). If teachers implement self-assessment without sufficient relevant knowledge and concrete instruction, the practice might be superficial and not lead to students’ improvement ( Panadero et al, 2016a ).…”

Language assessment course at Iranian state universities: An evaluation of the incorporation of assessment principles into the course content

“…Generally, LAL has been defined as a set of competencies that help teachers in the test design, analysis of data, evaluation, and other related aspects [ 4 , 5 , 7 , 10 , 23 , [25] , [26] , [27] ].…”