Teacher Assessment Literacy In University EFL Writing Instruction:From Conception To Practice

Chinese university students’ English writing proficiency is generally poor.Classroom assessment has a crucial role to play in enhancing students’ writing proficiency.Teachers should be assessment literate in order to conduct appropriate assessment practices.Teacher assessment literacy has been conceptualized as a dynamic decision-making process in which teachers’ assessment conceptions play a mediating role while teachers’ assessment practice can be considered as an outcome of this process.Therefore,teacher assessment conceptions and practices can be important points of entry for exploring the status quo of teachers’ assessment literacy.The aim of this multiphase mixed methods study was to explore Chinese university EFL teachers’ assessment literacy in writing instruction.The focus of this study was on 1)teachers’ conceptions of assessment,2)teachers’ use of formative assessment,3)the(mis)alignment between teachers’ conceptions of assessment and their assessment practices,and 4)the extent to which teachers can,as a result of their experience of professional development in assessment,shift their assessment conceptions and practices.To answer the first research question,teachers’ conceptions of assessment in Chinese university EFL writing instruction were examined by using the EFL Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment in Writing Instruction Questionnaire.An online survey of406 university EFL teachers was undertaken,with the focus on seven constructs: student accountability,school accountability,improvement,irrelevance,examination,control and development.Findings revealed that Chinese university EFL teachers held mixed but compatible conceptions of assessment,of which neither formative purposes nor summative purposes were dominant.A cluster analysis of the participant responses identified three distinctive opinion profiles dubbed Improvement,Low and Moderate.The results further demonstrated that the majority of teachers did not seem to strongly view classroom assessment as an effective approach to improving pedagogy and learning.To answer the second research question,the use of formative assessment strategies among Chinese university EFL teachers in their writing classrooms was investigated by using the EFL Teachers’ Use of Formative Assessment in Writing Instruction Questionnaire,with the focus on how they shared standards,elicited learning information,provided feedback,used self-/peer assessment,and how they used assessment information.Three hundred and sixty-two teachers participated in another online survey.Data revealed that these teachers used a limited range of formative assessment strategies,and that their implementation of these strategies was generally weak.They seldom used strategies such as eliciting information and student self-/peer assessment,but did place great emphasis on providing feedback.The analysis profiled three distinct levels of formative assessment usage among the respondents: occasional,moderate and frequent.The results further revealed that most of the teachers did not frequently implement classroom assessment strategies in their writing classrooms.To answer the third research question,multiple regression analyses were conducted to explore the(mis)alignment between teachers’ conceptions of assessment and their assessment practices.Findings showed that while the conception that assessment is irrelevant predicted a small proportion of the variance of teachers’ assessment practices,teachers’ positive conceptions of assessment did not predict their assessment practices in any key strategies.Overall,the teachers’ conceptions of assessment were not consistent with their assessment practices in their writing instruction.To further clarify and explain the statistical results from the first,quantitative,phase,in phase one of the qualitative study,the influential factors that impacted teachers’ conceptions of assessment,their use of formative assessment strategies,and the misalignment between assessment conceptions and practices were then explored using classroom observations and teacher interviews.To this end,nine prototypical EFL teachers took part in this study.Their writing classrooms were observed consecutively and they were then interviewed in order to provide follow-up explanations.Each teacher was engaged in a semi-structured interview.Findings showed that the contextual factors that impact on the teachers’ conceptions of assessment and use of formative assessment exist at multiple levels,including the macro,meso-,and micro-levels,such as the examination culture,school assessment policy,and teacher assessment training experience.In contrast,the factors that contributed to the conception-practice misalignment were identified primarily at the micro and meso levels.To answer the fourth research question,in phase two of the qualitative study,the changes in teachers’ conceptions of assessment and their involvement in formative assessment were explored after they had attended professional development in assessment.Four prototypical EFL teachers participated in this phase.Their writing classes were observed at the beginning,middle,and end of an 18-week semester.After all the observation data were collected,one-onone semi-structured interviews were then conducted.Data revealed that with greater teacher learning experiences,teachers became keenly aware that assessment practices should be centered on students’ learning needs.They did,however,believe that all of the conceptions of assessment are conducive to student learning.Additionally,only some of the case teachers included anchoring conceptions of assessment in their writing instruction.Therefore,these teachers were able to mobilize their beliefs and values among contextual affordances and constraints.On the other hand,teachers were able to improve their use of formative assessment in varying degrees in each key formative assessment category.When they implemented some key formative assessment strategies,however,they did not always carry out the more critical aspects of those strategies.Their translation of assessment learning was also found to be severely restricted by the ecological conditions and circumstances of College English courses.In such situations,teachers had to strike a balance between their effectiveness in employing formative assessment strategies and imposed practical constraints.These findings have both theoretical and practical implications.Theoretically,the study provides two suggested frameworks to measure and structure teachers’ conceptions of assessment,and their use of formative assessment in EFL writing instruction,respectively.This study also adds to the current understanding about this field by relating teachers’ conceptions of assessment,and formative assessment use,to salient personal and contextual influential factors,highlighting the need to advance thinking on this issue through fine-grained analysis.A tentative model has therefore been proposed to provide a holistic view of teacher assessment literacy in practice in EFL writing instruction.It is hoped that this model will stimulate future research for teacher assessment literacy.In addition,the interrelationships between teachers’ conceptions,their practices of assessment,and the personal and contextual factors,explain the inconsistencies between assessment policy and teaching realities,and the gaps between teachers’ assessment conceptions and their assessment practices.These interrelationships also ensure that teacher assessment literacy improvement is a slow and complex process.From a practical perspective,these findings have implications for assessment practices and teacher training.Firstly,the findings can be fed back to frontline teachers,who need to scrutinize their own strengths and weaknesses in classroom writing assessment and to reflect on how to make better compromises among the tensions arising from the affordances and constraints for employing classroom assessment in their immediate teaching realities.Secondly,there is a pressing need for teacher educators to understand the problems in teachers’ assessment literacy in practice and to provide tailored or adaptive interventions to address the problems.They can design or adapt their teacher training programs concerning assessment based on the known patterns of EFL teachers’ assessment conceptions and practices to better address teachers’ professional learning needs.Thirdly,concerted efforts from the government,university,and society are needed to provide teachers with support for attempting assessment for learning in a fuller sense.Limitations of this study and future directions were also discussed.