Mats Oscarson Britt Marie Apelgren Göteborg University/Sweden Mapping language teachers’ conceptions of student assessment procedures: A three-way empirical inquiry Recent developments in foreign language education have highlighted the need for a reorientation of assessment practices in schools. For a very long time the predominant view of language ability was that it consists of a set of skills having to do with control of the formal aspects of the language. Its words and syntactic structures, its phonological characteristics, its linguistic modalities, etc were considered to be the most proper objects of study. According to the more modern view, language ability is seen as a broad interactional skill which is dependent not only on mastery of language forms and functions but also on the context in which the language is used, on the user’s ability to employ his or her language for strategic purposes, on his or her knowledge of sociocultural and sociolinguistic language use conventions etc. The contempory view is that language is, above all, a medium for communication and interaction between people, not solely a structure which, once mastered, can be regarded as a guarantee for success whenever or whereever employed by its users. Communicative and interactional competence is thus what needs to be taught – and consequently tested and assessed – in schools. The problem is that the curricular change this circumstance entails is quite new to many members of the teaching profession and that the novel assessment task puts a much greater demand on the teacher than used to be the case in the measurement-wise more tractable “structural era”. The testing of words and grammar, for instance, is ordinarily a much less troublesome exercise than assessing someone’s ability to use the language for variable communicative purposes in real-life language situations. Not infrequently, today’s situation is aggravated by the fact that the entire field of assessment and grading of students tends to play a fairly inconspicuous role in most teacher training programs. This paper describes project work undertaken in order to, firstly, map out and analyze language teachers’ acquaintance with and attitudes towards new and more broadly aimed approaches to assessment, in particular such that promote autonomous learning and student self-assessment. Secondly, the aim of the work is to identify and make manifest teachers’ conceptions and understandings of student assessment purposes and principles. Two different methodological procedures are employed for the collection of research data. One is a questionnaire survey involving a Swedish nationally representative sample of 605 language education teachers who responded to classroom related questions on their student assessment preferences and practices. The other is an interview study involving a sub-sample of 20 teachers strategically drawn from the total sample of 605 teachers. The paper delineates the theoretical framework which underlies the research, that is personal and sociocultural constructivism. Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) methodology is used in the interview study, viz. so-called repertory grid technique in combination with content analysis using Nvivo 7. Methodological issues are discussed. Preliminary results derived from the three-way analysis of the independent – but from a content point of view inter-related – research data sets are quoted and discussed. Particular attention is given to findings which mirror typical instances of teachers’ thinking and received conceptions in key areas of the research and which are each corroborated through the multi-faceted methodological approach chosen.

Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) Repertory grid technique SPSS Nvivo 7

Analyses of data are still in progress at the time of writing (20 Feb 2008), so general conclusions are premature. Preliminary results indicate scanty knowledge of and familiarity with up-to-date assessment techniques among language teachers, particularly with regard to alternative assessment. There is an obvious need for improved teacher education in this field.