A Review on Language Assessment Literacy: Trends, Foci and Contributions

ABSTRACT

Language assessment literacy (LAL), an increasingly prominent research topic, has generated substantial literature in language testing and assessment. Thus far, there seems to be few comprehensive reviews on this research topic. The current scoping study reviewed a total of 81 papers by synthesising LAL studies published from 2008 to 2020. It addressed research questions concerning (1) the overall trend and progress, (2) the research foci and (3) characteristics of implications of LAL research for language teacher education and professional development. The review found that there was an upward trend in LAL studies, which were conducted predominantly in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and the Middle East, and that most studies employed qualitative over quantitative and mixed-methods designs. An overwhelming majority of studies focused on language teachers, especially EFL teachers, while few were conducted from the perspectives of learners, policy makers, language testers, teacher educators and other stakeholders. The review also discovered that most studies researched stakeholders’ LAL levels, needs and development, overlooking LAL developmental trajectories, localised LAL components, the development of LAL measures, perceptions of LAL and LAL impact. Three characteristics were identified from implications of LAL studies as contributions to language teacher education and professional development. Based on the findings, some guidelines were suggested for future research.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ms Yujie Zhou, Department of Education Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University and Dr. Changsheng Jiang, School of Foreign Languages, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law for their help with extracting and analysing the data in the study. We would also express our gratitude to Dr. Meilin Chen from the Language Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University, for her thoughtful comments and suggestions on the revision of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The full searching string on the two databases were TOPIC: (“language assessment literacy” OR “assessment literacy” OR “assessment competence” OR “assessment capacity/ability” OR “assessment knowledge” OR “assessment skills” AND language OR “language education”) and TITLE-ABS-KEY (“language assessment literacy” OR “assessment literacy” OR “assessment competence” OR “assessment capacity/ability” OR “assessment knowledge” OR “assessment skills” AND language OR “language education”).

² These articles are titled and abstracted with the words “assessment literacy” or “language assessment literacy”, but do not address LAL issues in the full text.

³ The numbered studies can be found as supplementary online material.

4 From 2018, the number of LAL studies increased dramatically with more than 10 publications each year. To ensure the roughly equal number of the sample, we divided the studies into those from 2008 to 2017 and those from 2018 to 2020 respectively.

⁵ (Crusan et al. 2016) reported that participants in their study covered those in Africa, but they did not clearly define the sample of the population. Kremmel and Harding’s study (2020) also included participants from Africa, but the sample size was quite small.

Additional information

Funding

The study was supported by Education and Science Special Funding Project of Hubei Province, China 2020ZA11).