Experience and Academic Degree as Determinants of L2 Teachers’ Conception of Language Assessment

This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between the teaching experience and academic degree of Iranian EFL teachers and their conceptions of second language assessment. To this end, a cohort of 40 male and female EFL teachers who were teaching English at private English language institutes were selected as the participants of the study. They ranged between 24 and 45 years in age. They filled out consent forms to participate in the study and also filled in their personal information including gender, age, academic degree, years of teaching experience, etc. Then, they answered a Brown’s (2006) Abridged Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment Questionnaire which is a valid scale for measuring language teachers’ conceptions of second language assessment. Finally, Pearson’s product moment correlation between both their teaching experience and academic degree on the one hand and their conceptions of assessment was calculated. More precisely, the correlation coefficients between their teaching experience/academic degree and different subcomponents of the scale were computed. The results showed that the teaching experience and academic degree of the high-experience high-degree teachers were significantly correlated with the subcomponents of school accountability, student accountability, and improve education. The teaching experience and academic degree of the high-experience lowdegree teachers were significantly correlated with the subcomponent of school accountability, and those of the low-experience high-degree group with the subcomponent of student accountability, and improve education, and those of the low-experience low-degree group with improve education. The theoretical interpretations of the findings have been presented in the discussion section.