Language Assessment Literacy in Theory and Practice
After examining several definitions of assessment literacy, or basic knowledge of testing, the testing awareness needs of several different groups are discussed. Firstly, what do teachers need to know about testing, and how is this knowledge best delivered to them? Then we observe the needs of stakeholders who are not directly involved in education, namely, policy makers, followed by those of university administrators. Finally the situation in university teaching is presented , and recommendations for improving assessment literacy are suggested. The term literacy has broadened considerably in its scope over the last 100 years. Initially of course it means the ability to read and write, a skill which for many centuries was the exclusive preserve of social elites. In a fairly static society and before the wide availability of texts with the invention of printing, illiteracy was hardly a handicap for the mass of the population. However, with the increasing complexity of society and the resulting need for gaining knowledge by reading and writing, individuals were motivated to make the effort to become literate, and finally in advanced countries the state enforced literacy by providing free compulsory education. Naturally this worked two ways: people were able to advance socially through their knowledge, but the
Assessment Literacy for the Language Classroom
Language testing has seen unprecedented expansion during the first part of the 21st century. As a result there is an increasing need for the language testing profession to consider more precisely what it means by “assessment literacy” and to articulate its role in the creation of new pedagogic materials and programs in language testing and assessment to meet the changing needs of teachers and other stakeholders for a new age. This article describes a research project in which a survey instrument was developed, piloted, and delivered on the Internet to elicit the assessment training needs of language teachers. The results were used to inform the design of new teaching materials and the further development of online resources that could be used to support program delivery. The project makes two significant contributions. First, it provides new empirically derived content for the concept of assessment literacy within which to frame materials development and teaching. Second, it uncovered methodological problems with existing survey techniques that may have impacted upon earlier studies, and solutions to these problems are suggested.
Textbook trends in teaching language testing
The article examines changes in language testing textbooks in English since Lado (1961) and proposes that two trends may be discerned. The first shows how the growing professionalism of the field has required an expansion in teaching materials to meet the need for new training programmes. What the expansion also shows is the desire, again a mark of increasing professionalism, to provide all teaching resources from within the profession so that for needed skills (e.g. statistics and measurement) it is now less necessary to appeal to outsiders such as statisticians and psychometricians. The second trend explains the need for the profession to expand its view of the skills needed by its members. From Lado onwards, skills were always conjoined with knowledge about language and about testing. More recently, the profession has explicitly declared a concern for principles with regard, for example, to validity and to ethics. The increasing professionalism comes at a cost: that cost is twofold: in-housing all resources means that language testers are increasingly insulated from other potentially rewarding disciplines. And the complete resource offerings in the later teaching materials means that students may be denied empirical encounters with real language learners, spending all (or much of) their training within the resource material. The article also questions how far research has informed the changes in training materials.