Language assessment has always been given its important status in all educational programmes since the outcomes of assessment, testing or evaluation always have immediate impacts on the futures of individuals, language programmes and educational policies. Some assessment policies get changed because they are not aligned with international standards and benchmarks. Others are just reconsidered because they do not prepare learners for their field of work. Whatever the reasons might be, assessment policies always remain contingent upon different variables that are not sometimes pertaining to some direct stakeholders such as teachers and learners. Learners are always perceived as the centre of any language assessment planning where all stakeholders strive hard to preserve the decent rights of learners wherever they are in the world. However, contrary to the ordinary scene, learners sometimes fail to be aware or their awareness of the different assessment problems that might harm their educational life. This lack of awareness might be conducive to many ad hoc decisions taken by policy-makers to change this assessment policy.
On the other side of the continuum, along with learners, teachers are also said to hold a prominent role in the implementation and success of this assessment policy. It happens then more than often that teachers may find themselves in direct conflict with some stakeholders such as policy-makers, parents and even learners. This misunderstanding takes place because these people have different perceptions of assessment, and what might even worsen the situation is that most often expectations are too high to the extent that these people might find themselves in direct conflicts especially when their expectations are not met. In some contexts, such conflicts are very recurrent especially in the absence of a clear assessment policy or a clear code of ethics. The International Language Testing Association (ILTA) has been very influential in drafting assessment policies thanks to its code of ethics (2000). In other contexts, such codes of ethics have never been considered to the extent that problems always occur with the first misunderstandings. For teachers to keep up with the assessment changing requirements and the new challenges, they should be aware of the different manifestations of assessment so that they can know where they are heading in terms of assessing the course learning outcomes and course objectives. To address this, a revisiting of the assessment conceptions and practices (Hidri, 2016, 2018a, 2019a) should be done so that teachers and test designers can know about and how to implement classroom-based assessment, such AfL, AoL, DA, formative and summative assessment. To start with, the testing paradigm should be made clearer.
Norm-Referenced vs. Criterion-Referenced Testing
Teachers, as one of the prominent figures in language assessment, may fail to lead changes in assessment especially when they still implement an assessment policy that is not congruent with the expectations of the new challenges of the modern testing theories. As a case in point, many educational contexts still draft their assessment policies, tests and benchmarks from a norm-referenced perspective where, for instance, tests are used to classify students as per scores in comparison to one another. At this level, teachersā decisions are not based on valid judgements and therefore any inference based on studentsā test scores will be groundless since it lacks objective judgement. This testing paradigm is still surfacing in different educational contexts where test-takers are assessed on their overall abilities, and in relation to the performance of other test-takers (Brown, 1996). This was the assessment policy that reigned many educational contexts. By mid-sixties, a new assessment approach was breaking through with a new assessment policy that was labelled as ācriterion-referencedā. Unlike norm-referenced assessment, criterion-referenced assessment was anchored in the testing of well-defined objectives and goals which are pertaining to specific programmes and contexts. Unlike the norm-referenced policy, criterion-referenced assessment is applicable only to its very contexts. Test-takersā ability is assessed regardless of the ability of the other test-takers in the norm-referenced assessment policy. Test scores are attributed based on studentsā knowledge and mastery of specific objectives in a given period of time. As part of the challenges awaiting language teachers and test designers, an awareness of a clear cut between the different assessment approaches must be done, and for them to be equipped with the right strategies to know which approach to use, they need to be open to the ongoing assessment requirements to avoid having a daunting attitude towards assessment.
Assessment of Learning and Assessment for Learning
Assessment is a significant step to administer after any programme of instruction, and the nature of it depends largely on the learning objectives and assessment environment in a context. Alongside summative and formative assessments in second language teaching, the concept of assessment āforā learning has emerged quite rigorously after very common assessment āofā learning (Green, 2...