Assessment purposes and procedures in ESL/EFL classrooms

Abstract

University instructors’ classroom assessments play a central role in and inevitably influence their teaching and their students’ learning. This paper reports on a comparative interview study conducted in a range of three ESL/EFL university contexts in Canada, Hong Kong and China. Six major aspects of ESL/EFL classroom assessment practices were explored: instructors’ assessment planning for the courses they taught, the relative weight given to course work and tests in their instruction, the type of assessment methods (selection vs. supply methods) that they used, the purposes each assessment was used for, the source of each method used, and when they used each method. University instructors were also asked to indicate what they saw as the advantages and disadvantages of the methods they used, and whether they took into account prior student knowledge when making decisions about what assessment methods to use. The findings contribute to a better understanding of ESL/EFL university instructors’ classroom assessment practices at the tertiary level in a range of three ESL/EFL university teaching contexts.

Acknowledgements

Support for the project was made possible in part through funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to Professors Jo Lewkowicz (University of Hong Kong) and Yi’an Wu (Beijing Foreign Studies University). Thanks also go to the many instructors who took the time and effort to talk with the authors in the three settings. Without them, it would not have been possible to complete the study. Finally, they wish to thank the journal editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on this paper. The article was also supported by a MOE Project of the National Key Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China.

Notes

1. The term ‘instructors’ is used in the present paper to refer to those who are teaching ESL/EFL at the tertiary education level, and the term ‘teachers’ is used to refer to those who are teaching at the elementary and/or secondary school levels.

2. Selection methods are those methods that require students to select their answer(s) from the options provided (e.g. yes/no, true/false, and multiple‐choice items). Supply methods refer to those methods that require students to produce/supply their own responses (e.g. short answer, essay, projects, or oral questions).

3. Students who attend ‘elite’ universities in China generally do not take the College English Test. Instead, they take a test designed internally by their university.

4. We have italicized each purpose when it is mentioned for the first time. We then state the purposes in regular fonts when they come up again and indicate the number of responses in parentheses.