Mind the Gap: New Policies on Language Teaching and EFL Teachers' Online Classroom-Based Assessment Practices in Covid-۱۹ Pandemic

Despite a surge of research interest in teachers’ assessment literacy in both general education and language education, there is an apparent lack of attention to the role of new policies mandating to turn all teaching online as a direct and inevitable result of the coronavirus disease outbreak in EFL teachers’ online classroom-based assessment practices. Motivated by the aforementioned gap, this study aimed to investigate Iranian EFL teachers’ online assessment practices during the Covid-۱۹ pandemic and to see whether their assessment practices match the demands to accommodate the needs for alternative assessment methods as stipulated by new teaching and learning policies. To achieve this purpose, ۱۰ EFL teachers were recruited using purposive and convenience sampling to take part in semi-structured retrospective interviews to explore their online assessment practices. To further investigate and analyze their online assessment practices, three sessions of their online classroom instruction and assessment were also video and audiotaped. The results collectively indicated that a good deal of variability existed across language teachers in terms of their classroom-based assessment practices, and the participating teachers raised the degree of formative assessment to some extent and reduced the degree of summative assessment. However, their online assessment practices largely mismatched the ones offered by policies of Iran’s the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology during Covid-۱۹ pandemic, and there was only little time left to teachers to contemplate the interconnectedness among language policies, teaching, and assessment. The findings might have important implications for language teachers, teacher educators, teacher education centers, and policy makers.

کلیدواژه ها:

Assessment Policies ، Classroom-Based Assessment ، Covid-۱۹ Pandemic ، Formative Assessment ، Language Assessment Literacy ، Online Language Assessment Practices ، Summative Assessment