Formative assessment in the EFL context of kermanshah high schools: Teachers' familiarity and application

Abstract

Formative assessment in language teaching classes is gaining significance as one tool for successful teaching. For the teachers, administers, district managers, policy makers, and all those who lend a hand with the learning/teaching process, formative assessment can act as key factor in determining their exact whereabouts, and specifying where to go in the process .The debatable issue, however, is whether English langue teachers , as the key role players of the learning-teaching process, in the formal high schools of Kermanshah district are familiar with and employ realized-as-the-most-significant assessment techniques (questioning, feedback without grades, self-assessment, peer-assessment, and formative use of summative assessment)  by Black and colleagues (2004) in their teaching act. With reference to such debate, the present study aimed at eliciting the extent of familiarity and employment of five assessment techniques from high school teachers in the formal context of education in Kermanshah district.To this end, two questionnaires, one open-ended and one 20-item Likert scale was distributed among 200 high school teachers (100 male and 100 female) in Kermanshah province. The results of statistical survey manifested that, despite highly positive perception and evaluation of the five assessment techniques, high school teachers in Kermanshah province employed just questioning technique in their classes significantly, with the four other techniques remained unemployed to a great extent.

Keywords: formative assessment, EFL context, high schools, assessment techniques.