Novice EFL Teachers Perceptions of Speaking Assessment Literacy

As teachers are among the stakeholders for the assessment of learners’ communicative language ability, their assessment literacy has recently become an important concept in language teacher education. The present study probed into teachers’ perceptions of their speaking assessment literacy. Twenty novice Iranian EFL teachers with less than two years of teaching experience participated in this study. Interviews were to explore the teachers perception of speaking assessment in four areas: (a) rating scales for assessing speaking, (b) formative and summative assessment of speaking performance, (c) teacher assessment, peer assessment, and self-assessment, and (d) tasks and activities for speaking assessment. The findings indicated that the majority of the teachers preferred analytic to holistic rating scale due to its rating accuracy. Also, it was found that these teachers mostly used summative assessment while neglecting formative one. As to the agent of assessment, the teachers used teacher assessment at the expense of peer- and self-assessment. Finally, the textbooks and the tasks within them were found to be the main source of speaking tasks used for assessment by novice teachers. These findings suggest that novice EFL teachers’ literacy of speaking assessment is limited and needs to be enhanced.