Critical language assessment literacy of EFL teachers: Scale construction and validation

Abstract

Critical language assessment (CLA) has been addressed in numerous studies. However, the majority of the studies have overlooked the need for a practical framework to measure the CLA dimension of teachers’ language assessment literacy (LAL). This gap prompted us to develop and validate a critical language assessment literacy (CLAL) scale to further underscore the role of CLA principles and their practice as an essential part of teachers’ LAL. In the first phase, a pool of items was generated through a comprehensive review of the related studies. In the quantitative phase, the developed scale was administered to 255 English as a foreign language teachers selected through convenience and snowball sampling. The data were analyzed through exploratory factor analysis for construct validity and Cronbach’s alpha for estimating internal consistency. The results showed that the items loaded on five factors: (a) teachers’ knowledge of assessment objectives, scopes, and types; (b) assessment use consequences; (c) fairness; (d) assessment policies; and (e) national policy and ideology. It was found that the scale had a high level of internal consistency and construct validity, which suggests that this scale has the potential to be useful in assessing language teachers’ CLAL and to raise language teachers’ awareness of CLAL constructs.

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

“…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;).…”

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

“…The selected course materials did not include content associated with ethics in assessment, either. Generally, it seemed that the approaches taken by the course instructors were not aligned with the recommendations in literature that teachers need to be aware of the significance of assessing their learners fairly and unbiasedly [ 9 , 19 , 28 , [60] , [61] , [62] ]. In practice, it cannot be claimed that the two course instructors were inconsiderate about fairness and ethical issues; however, the lack of such considerations was somehow noticeable in some aspects.…”

“…Since three decades ago, scholars in education have called for the development of assessment literacy by different stakeholders, including teachers [ [2] , [3] , [4] , 8 , [11] , [12] , [13] , [19] , [20] , [21] , [22] ]. The significant contribution of being assessment literate is that teachers are far more likely to avoid making the assessment-related mistakes so common in educational systems, which can lead to the success of learners and schools [ 4 , 12 , 20 ].…”

“…Kremmel and Harding [ 7 ], underscoring the importance of developing competence in assessment principles argued that “a heightened awareness of the principles and practice of language assessment would ideally lead to more informed discussion of assessment matters, clarity around good practice in using language assessments, and ultimately more robust decision making on the basis of assessment data” (p.100). As one more recent endeavor to highlight the role of principles of LAL, reference can be made to the study by Tajeddin et al [ 19 ], which aimed to design and validate an inventory to measure Iranian EFL teachers' awareness of principles, referred to as ‘critical language assessment literacy’ (CLAL). According to their findings, CLAL comprised “(a) teachers' knowledge of assessment objectives, scopes, and types; (b) assessment use consequences; (c) fairness; (d) assessment policies; and (e) national policy and ideology” (p. 649).…”

“…In line with these studies, the present research attempted to investigate whether the language assessment course, as a pre-service training course, at the BA level at Iranian state universities, builds up prospective teachers' LAL. The study focused on the efficacy of the course in raising pre-service teachers' awareness of the principles underlying language assessment, which seems to be an understudied and one of the poorest aspects of LAL [ 19 ]. For this purpose, the content of the official syllabus issued by MSRT [ 1 ] was analyzed.…”