Are Preferences for Assessment Techniques Related to Learners’ Learning Strategies?

One important area in the field of language assessment which has been favored in recent years is related to the issue of the relationship between learning strategies and different instructions and assessment techniques. In particular, it is not yet clearly known what type and why some assessment techniques are more preferred by learners who tend to use different learning strategies. Thus, this study is devoted to find out the relationships between two categories of learning strategies (cognitive and meta-cognitive) employed by EFL learners on the one hand and EFL learners’ preferences for assessment techniques on the other hand. Data for the study was collected from two inventory questionnaires, Assessment Preferences Inventory (API) and Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), which were given to 70 adult EFL learners-both men and women-in two institutes in Shiraz who are studying English as their foreign language. The results indicated that learners who used cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies had different preferences for assessment techniques to a large extent. The results suggest that not only should English teachers consider their learners’ learning strategies, but also they ought to pay close attention to different assessment techniques which best suit their learners’ preferences.