Teacher Educators’ Conceptions of Language Assessment Literacy in Norway

Abstract

In order to gain a deeper understanding of what language assessment literacy (LAL) is and how it can be developed, it is relevant to investigate it from the point of view of different stakeholders (Harding & Kremmel, 2016). As for teacher LAL, this phenomenon has largely been studied from the teachers’ own perspectives, leaving other stakeholders’ understanding of the construct underresearched. The current study used an exploratory, qualitative research design to investigate teacher educators’ conceptions of teacher LAL in the Norwegian educational context. Teacher educators are an influential stakeholder group in education, whose knowledge of teaching and assessment can inform our understanding of teacher LAL in important ways. Taking Taylor’s (2013) LAL model as a starting point, this study explored five English teacher educators’ general understanding of teacher LAL, as well as the relevance of the components of Taylor’s model in particular. The study provides important empirical evidence of how teacher LAL may be understood and how Taylor’s model can be further developed.

A phenomenographic study on language assessment literacy: hearing from Iranian university teachers

“…There has been an increasing interest in LAL among researchers and practitioners over the last decades (Davies, 2008;Fulcher, 2010Fulcher, , 2012Malone, 2013) which has led to a large body of research across different settings (Bøhn & Tsagari, 2021;Coombe et al, 2012;Homayounzadeh & Razmjoo, 2021;Janatifar & Marandi, 2018;Popham, 2009;Shahzamani & Tahririan, 2021;Stiggins, 1995;Vogt & Tsagari, 2014;Wang et al, 2006;Watmani et al, 2020;Xu & Brown, 2016;Yan & Fan, 2021;Zhou et al, 2020). Due to space limit, only some are reviewed to lay the groundwork for the current study.…”

“…The findings revealed that although most of the participants had required assessment literacy, some could not even make a distinction between "assessment of learning" and "assessment for learning." Exploring teacher educators' understandings of LAL in Norway was the focus of a study carried out by Bøhn and Tsagari (2021), indicating that for the participants, LAL includes four primary competences, namely disciplinary, assessment-specific, pedagogical, and collaboration. More recently, Yan and Fan (2021) conducted a qualitative study to explore the contextual and experiential factors affecting language testers, EFL teachers, and graduate students' LAL profile in the Chinese context.…”

Language Assessment Literacy: Insights for Educating English Language Teachers through Assessment

“…Giraldo ( 2018) is my most cited, and it has been used to highlight trends in the field (Bøhn & Tsagari, 2021;Butler, Peng, & Lee, 2021), differentiate LAL from its generic term, assessment literacy (Lan & Fan, 2019;Sultana, 2019), and discuss LAL against teachers' professional development and practice (Buendía & Macías, 2019;Rauf & McCallum, 2020). The citations come from researchers both in Colombia and elsewhere.…”

Multiple Stakeholder Interaction to Enhance Preservice Teachers’ Language Assessment Literacy

“…The collaboration helped the course instructor enhance her LAL as well. While course instructors are influential stakeholders in teacher education, less information about their LAL is known (Bøhn and Tsagari 2021;Jeong 2013). In the current study, the authors confirmed that through interaction with the inservice teacher, the course instructor also developed further understanding of the ways to contextualize language assessment theories and practices.…”