The essentials of assessment literacy: Contrasts between testers and users

Abstract

Language assessment literacy refers to language instructors’ familiarity with testing definitions and the application of this knowledge to classroom practices in general and specifically to issues related to assessing language. While it is widely agreed that classroom teachers need to assess student progress, many teachers and other test users have a limited understanding of assessment fundamentals. To help meet this need, a tutorial for foreign language instructors was developed (CAL, 2009) to describe the basics of language assessment and assist with test selection. In this project, group interviews and surveys were used to elicit feedback from two groups of experts, US language instructors (N = 44) and language testers (N = 30), on the content of the tutorial. The results of the project revealed the challenges of including the technical information considered essential by testers while meeting the real and practical needs of teachers. This paper investigates efforts to elicit language testers’ beliefs about measurement basics compared with those of language educators and suggests that expert beliefs about what is essential to include in such materials differ depending on the expert perspective.

Language Assessment Literacy: Implications for Language Teachers

“…Understanding of the political [and] social Given the array of elements in lal, it is not surprising that scholars in language testing are still debating the boundaries of the concept (Fulcher, 2012;Jeong, 2013;Malone, 2013;Scarino, 2013;Taylor, 2013). Inbar-Lourie (2013a) wonders what the essentials for lal actually are, and invites discussions and research to expand and clarify lal and its uniqueness.…”

Development and promotion research of the College foreign language teachers' language appraisal literacy (LAL)

“…Language appraisal literacy refers to language teachers' mastery of appraisal methods and their ability to apply appraisal knowledge to classroom practice (Malone 2013). Also language testing is different with other subject testing because language is a testing tool and the subject to be estimated.…”

Monitoring “Testing Language Skills: From Theory to Practice” from the Perspective of Assessment Literacy

“…Assessment literacy is the extent to which learners, teachers and other stakeholders have familiarity and awareness of the assessment and its application in educational or academic contexts (Malone, 2013;Inbar-Lourie, 2008). It also refers to the principles, skills and knowledge that are required for every stakeholder to be able to check the degree to which the learning objectives have been achieved (Fulcher, 2012).…”

“…It also refers to the principles, skills and knowledge that are required for every stakeholder to be able to check the degree to which the learning objectives have been achieved (Fulcher, 2012). Accordingly, assessment literacy acts as one of the effective precursors of learning (Malone, 2013).…”