| Assessment runs through the whole process of teaching,and its effective implementation guarantees the effectiveness of learning and teaching.A relatively independent but interdependent and indivisible "teaching-assessment-learning"community was formed by three of them.Since Standards for Teacher Competence in Educational Assessment of Students was posed in 1990(AFT,NCME,NEA,1990),assessment literacy(AL)has attracted researchers' focuses,mainly on defining teachers'assessment literacy,specifying stakeholder groups and constructing framework,experiencing a progressive development from brewing,germinating,terminology evolving,connotation constructing,emphasis shifting and elements changing,and language assessment literacy(LAL)was naturally budded in the complex process,during which problems including unclear discipline-oriented definition(e.g.what distinctiveness of assessment literacy should be in different disciplines?Or what language is referred to?),unclear stakeholder definition(Who are the stakeholders?Who should understand assessment literacy,and what assessment literacy should they understand?),unidimensional construction of framework(either from textbooks,or from standards interpretation,or course designing survey)and over-macro defining of its connotation,without specific subdivisions and descriptors to be visualized were uncovered.According to literature review,basing on China's national conditions of foreign language education policy and planning guiding ideology and philosophy,this study integrates 7 categories including Teaching Suggestions,Evaluation Suggestions,Textbook Framework,How-to Materials,Need Survey,China Standards of English and Self-compilation,etc.,employing 12 categories,extracted from 7 dimensions,whose final construction has undergone several-round considerations and reflections from the judgement of the author,the expertise and the subjects of this research,which helped ensure the scientific and valid construction and validation of the procedure.Thus,in order to conduct this research,the author reset three preconditions and two research questions were posed accordingly.The belief held in this research is that assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning,as a test for ensuring the degree of their cooperation and matching.Three premises are:a.assessment happens on the condition of the average knowledge about language descriptions and relevant linguistic characteristics;b.English as a foreign language in Chinese context,has its mediation of English,a language different from Chinese,and,meanwhile,is influenced by Chinese language and culture.c.assessment refers to classroom-based assessment and standardized assessment,existing in and out of classroom teaching,defined as all the possible knowledge and activities involved in assessment and testing.Additionally,the three premises above derive two guiding ideas of this study:first,English teachers in first-line middle schools spend 1/3 to 1/2 of their time engaged in activities related to assessment(Stiggins,1991).Their assessment literacy covers a wider range than other assessment literacy stakeholder groups,including knowledge and theories related to classroom-based assessment and standardized assessment,and the difference is that different groups show different levels of difficulty due to their needs.Second,this study aims at developing an assessment literacy self-assessing scale for Chinese middle school English teachers,based on the preliminary investigation of LAL cognition and proficiency,and combined with the distribution characteristics and literacy status of Chinese middle school English teachers.Thus,two research questions were spawn with three or four sub-questions set below as:1.What constitutes the self-assessing scale for the language assessment literacy of Chinese middle school English teachers?(How is the construction of this self-assessing scale?)(1)What are the basic elements of LAL self-assessing scale?(2)What are the basic connotation of LAL self-assessing scale?(3)How is the structural hierarchy of LAL self-assessing scale?2.To what extent is the LAL self-assessing scale valid?(1)How rational are the descriptors concluded in LAL self-assessing scale?(2)How rational is the construct of the LAL self-assessing scale?(3)How is the discriminability of LAL self-assessing scale hierarchy?The two research questions above concern the construction and the validation of this research respectively.In order to better answer the above research questions,both quantitative methods and qualitative methods are involved accordingly.Quantitative research is adopted for helping statistical exploration and confirmation,qualitative research is mainly used in structural interviews for the validation of content and structural rationality,the differentiation and usability of the questionnaire and the self-assessing scale.The questionnaire was finalized after two pilots,three rounds of expert judgment and 26 self-corrections.In the formal study,the subjects were selected mainly through convenient sampling and snowball sampling method,covering 16 provinces and 2 municipal cities,with 1207 middle school English teachers,8 middle school students and 6 teachers with senior-rank professional titles participating in the questionnaire survey or interview.1140(excluding invalid data)of survey data was analyzed according to research needs with SPSS25.0 and AMOS 25.0,respectively though descriptive statistics analysis,exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis,structural equation modeling,analysis of variance(ANOVA),independent samples T-test,correlation test and distinguishability and practicality test,with structural interview results to help answer the two research questions above.All analysis results prove that the constructed framework:assessment philosophy,assessment principle and assessment practice and their sub-constituents,is scientific and rational,and simultaneously reveals the further necessity of LAL and its relevant discussion in future study. |
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