239 / 2018-08-30 08:24:49

Assessment Literacy of College EFL Teachers in China

assessment literacy; EFL teaching; language testing and assessment; training needs

全体主题 > 教师测评素养

Teachers devote much of their time to evaluating students’ performances and assessing students’ learning skills and ability, which means that they need the necessary expertise in testing and assessment. To find out how much Chinese EFL teachers at college know about language testing and assessment (LTA) and to identify what LTA knowledge they expect to be trained in the teacher training program, the current study surveyed 272 EFL teachers from 146 universities in China with a self-designed questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of three parts, namely experiences in testing-related activities, knowledge about LTA, needs for training in LTA. Factor analysis revealed that each part of the questionnaire had satisfactory construct validity, and the reliability was also acceptable with the Cronbach alpha ranging from 0.700 to 0.971.
The results from the questionnaire show that the teachers in general had less experiences in assessment-related activities such as designing exercises in published textbooks and workbooks, attending lectures and seminars about LTA, being raters of large-scale tests, except that they acknowledged that they had much classroom assessment practices. As for the knowledge about LTA, the teachers admitted that they had enough knowledge about classroom assessment, and they knew much about linguistics, language learning theories and rating criteria. However, their literacy about test design and item writing, item analysis and interpretation of scores, language testing theories and principles was very limited. Although major, gender, final degree, and years of teaching experiences had some influence over the teachers’ past experiences in and current knowledge about LTA, all teachers involved expressed a strong need for LTA training in every aspect.