Enhancing the Language Assessment Literacy of Teachers - A European Perspective

Assessment-related activities account for about 30 to 50 % of a language teacher's workload (Coombe, Troudi & Al-Hamly, 2012). Therefore one of the important tasks of language teacher education entails developing language assessment literacy (LAL, e.g. Inbar-Louie 2013; Taylor 2013). However, research has shown that in many educational contexts across and beyond Europe, English language teachers are not well prepared to create quality assessment materials and procedures (Vogt & Tsagari 2014), a prerequisite for sustainable foreign language learning. The need for an efficient assessment training infrastructure becomes obvious.

The paper will present the results of a three-year-long ERASMUS+ project entitled "Teachers' Assessment Literacy Enhancement" (TALE), focusing on its first phase. TALE involves a network of assessment experts across Europe who have joined forces to provide such a training infrastructure based on a thorough needs analysis. The focus of the paper will be on the needs analysis that adopted an exploratory design based on quantitative data. A questionnaire was administered to 852 EFL teachers and 1788 students in various European contexts, investigating how teachers and their students perceive assessment, the types of assessment used, the impact of these assessments on learning and suggestions for improvement. Descriptive and inferential statistics have been used to examine these aspects, helping us understand the assessment needs of two important groups of stakeholders. The results of the study also offer insights into teacher cognition of their and their students' LAL needs and outline pressing challenges which exist for fostering LAL in EFL classes.