Abstract
Assessment is an integral part of an English teachers’ instruction since it enables them to visualize the extent of successful instructions. However, teachers might not pay much attention to their role to help their students improve their learning. Even, many English language teachers seem to focus more on traditional formats of assessment such as multiple choice, true false, matching type, etc. and pay little attention to the washback effects of these kinds of assessment on students’ learning. This paper argues that a traditional assessment has at least two fundamental flaws. There is a little chance to identify the students’ factual skills as it only focuses on formal assessment. In addition, it only focuses on achievement of high scores under test conditions. This orientation can be misleading to the nature of language instruction itself. Therefore, this research article explores the washback effects of performance-based assessment as a current trend in English Language Teaching (ELT) in secondary-school students’ learning. To investigate this issue, in-depth interview, classroom observation, and document analysis were employed as the data collection methods. The merits of the research are to indicate how to arrange performance-based assessment and to identify its washback effects in the students’ learning. The results conclude that performance-based assessment encouraged and motivated students to learn more. Students’ perception in this type of assessment was positive and they strived to be more successful in their learning. Keywords: performance-based assessment, washback effects, student learning.
Highlights
Language assessment is a field of study under the umbrella of applied linguistics (Safa and Goodarzi, 2014) and its main focus is the assessment of first, second and foreign languages in school, college, or university context
These positive washback effects might not have resulted using the traditional standardized achievement tests where the students just choose the options provided in a particular set of the test
Performancebased assessment was proven to have the positive washback effects as students were motivated well to learn while the traditional assessments were not comparatively of the same positive washback effect
Summary
Language assessment is a field of study under the umbrella of applied linguistics (Safa and Goodarzi, 2014) and its main focus is the assessment of first, second and foreign languages in school, college, or university context. There are at least two modes of language assessment that English language teachers may follow to assess a student’s learning. The first one is traditional standardized achievement tests It is mostly in the format of paper and pen tests such as multiple-choice, true false and matching type tests. Performance-based assessment can be used by English language teachers to assess a student’s learning by following numerous methods of assessment such as oral presentation, story-telling, dramatic reading, English debate, etc. It is a more challenging format of assessment to develop and implement than those of others as assessment is a key to student engagement (Irwin and Hepplestone, 2012). These two kinds of assessment have their own strengths and weaknesses to assess students’ learning outcomes in English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom
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