Overview of Language Assessment Literacy Research and Future Directions

Speaker: Dr Jiyoon LEE (UMBC, USA)

Language assessment literacy (LAL) has been theorized as education stakeholders’ 1) understanding of language assessments’ principles, 2) skills of developing assessment and interpret/use/disseminate language assessment results, and 3) understanding of the socio-cultural-political consequences of assessment (Davies, 2008; Inbar-Lourie, 2008; Fulcher, 2012; Lee, 2019). While there are some discrepancies in the details of LAL models, the theoretical discussions have reached to the general consensus that LAL is critical for education stakeholders to enhance their language

learning/teaching/assessment experiences. This talk will present an empirical research study that examined pre-service language teachers’ LAL development. While engaging in a pedagogical project of developing a language assessment and critiquing their assessment practices, pre-service teachers shared their understanding of sound language assessment and needs of developing LAL in two reflections, prior to and after the project. Thematic analyses of the preservice teachers’ reflections revealed that compared to their pre-project reflections, their post-project reflections provided more detailed and specific information about sound language assessment and their LAL needs. More importantly, their post-project reflections provided broadened perspectives of the scope of language assessment consequences including socio-culturalpolitical impact of language assessment.

This talk will also explore future research agenda of LAL in relation to 1) stakeholders other than teachers; 2) interface of teacher-education; 3) research methodologies.