A Chinese EFL Teacher’s Classroom Assessment Practices

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a case study of how an experienced EFL teacher assessed her students in her oral English course at a university in China. Data were collected over one semester through document analysis, classroom observation and recording, interviews, and student journals. Analysis revealed that the teacher assessed her students through both summative assessment (SA) and formative assessment (FA), with some assessment practices serving both formative and summative purposes simultaneously (dual-purpose CA). Moreover, the teacher integrated her FA and SA in a productive way that pushed her students to make progress in an upward spiral. The article ends with a recommendation that experienced teachers’ expertise on classroom assessment should be revealed and described, which may help teachers bridge the gap between assessment theories and classroom practices.

Acknowledgment

I am sincerely grateful to my PhD supervisors, Prof. John Read and Dr. Rosemary Erlam from Auckland University, for their valuable advice during my research, to all the participants for their support and cooperation, and to all my Chinese colleagues, especially to Prof. Yan Lin, for their selfless help of one kind or another.

Notes

¹ Non-English-major programs offer English teaching to university students who have their own majors, such as Mathematics, Physics, Law, or Medicine. Students are expected to possess minimum English ability so that their future development in their major field will not be hindered.

² English-major programs offer English teaching to university students who choose English as their major and try to perfect their English skills and enrich their knowledge about English language and culture during their university life. They are expected to become advanced or even native-like English users upon graduation.

³ All participants’ names in this article are pseudonyms.

⁴ Originally, the researcher conducted stimulated recall (SR) (Gass & Mackey, 2000), but found it too time-consuming to replay the recording for each of the recorded sessions. Therefore, after each observed session, the researcher summarized all those activities or episodes that contained CA practices, and during the interviews mainly used the summaries as cues, although important episodes were still replayed for the interviewees. Because this practice was not SR in a strict sense, it was renamed as stimulated retrospective interviews to avoid confusion.

⁵ In this article, the following short forms are used to indicate the source of a piece of data. BI: baseline interview; COF28042011: classroom observation field notes collected on April 28, 2011; SRI: stimulated retrospective interview; EoSI: end-of-semester interview CRT31032011: classroom recording transcript collected on March 31 2011; and J3: journal three.