The impact of assessment training on English as a Foreign Language university professors' classroom writing assessment: Reported Practice and Perceptions

Abstract

This study analysed the impact that two sessions of writing assessment training had on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Mexican university teachers. It focuses on three main areas of impact, a) teachers´ reported classroom assessment of students´ writing skills, b) teachers´, language program managers´ and students´ perceptions towards writing assessment as well as assessment training and c) the changes that training may have encouraged in teachers´ analytic and holistic scoring.

Forty-eight EFL university teachers and four EFL program managers took part in the initial stage of the study, which included, a participant background questionnaire, the first training session, a pre-training interview and an initial round of analytic and holistic assessment of five opinion essay samples. Additionally, four groups of EFL students took part in a pre-training and post-training focus group interview.

From these forty-eight teachers, eleven continued on to the second phase of the study, by participating in a second training session, a post-training interview, answering a post-training online questionnaire and scoring the same written samples analytically and holistically once more. Participants were tracked for a period of 12 months to analyse the changes that assessment training could have encouraged. Data obtained from the participant background questionnaire, the scores to the five opinion essays, and the online post-training questionnaire were collected and analysed quantitatively while the semistructured interviews and the student focus groups were conducted and examined under a qualitative approach.

Data suggested that teacher participants and language managers considered the training useful, practical and objective for their future assessment practice. However, the impact of the sessions on classroom assessment practice was quite shallow. Instead, more impact was found in teachers´ reflective processes and self-awareness of themselves as EFL teachers and assessors. A Writing Assessment Training Impact Categorization is proposed so as to classify this impact. It is believed that results may have implications for EFL assessment, language program management and teacher training. Further discussion of results and implications of these for the EFL context in Mexico is provided.

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ORCID for Ying Zheng: orcid.org/0000-0003-2574-0358

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