Designing,Implementing And Evaluating A Language Assessment Literacy Training Program For Rural English Teachers

In recent years,the focus of assessment research is shifting from “assessment of learning” to “assessment for learning” and “assessment as learning”,which expects language teachers to develop higher language assessment literacy.However,language teachers,especially rural English teachers whose training resources are much poorer,are facing various difficulties in conducting assessment activities,including the selection of assessment measures,the development of valid grading procedure and criteria,and etc.Therefore,the current research devoted to diagnosing the current level of rural language teachers’ LAL and to identifying their training needs and preferences,based on which a LAL training was developed and evaluated.Questionnaires,case study and semi-structured interviews are conducted to gather quantitative as well as qualitative data.It was found that rural English teacher in western Guangdong province had limited level of LAL in both external assessment and classroom assessment.Teachers reached a consensus that the core of conducting a teacher-preferred training program is to take teachers’ authentic needs into consideration and to illustrate the training content with practical teaching cases.Meanwhile,in order to guarantee teachers’ learning efficiency,the training program should try its best to reduce teachers’ training burden by designing the training form considerately.Based on teachers training needs and preferences,a LAL training was developed,which consisted of offline lecture,online resources(videos,textbooks and notes)and one-to-one application instruction(making demo lecture and designing teacher research).Finally,the effectiveness of the LAL training is evaluated by comparison and interviews,which reflects that teachers highly appreciate the practicality of the offline lecture and they would like to embed the cases illustrated in the lecture into their daily teaching,but they show less interest to the online resources,which may partly due to their unawareness of the problems existing in their assessment activities.The present research proposed elements of an effective and popular LAL training program.First,making teachers aware of their own training needs is the first step to stimulate teachers’ training motivation.Secondly,transforming the training results into materialized results(such as academic research projects and teaching competitions)related to the improvement of teachers’ professional titles can reduce teachers’ burden of teaching,researching and training simultaneously,which hence significantly improve their training enthusiasm.Finally,continuous observation and guidance after the training is conducive to consolidating the training results and discovering the deficiencies in the training.