Teaching EFL to children: reflections on (future) teachers’ language assessment literacy

Abstract

This article presents some reflections on the language assessment literacy of seven EFL undergraduates and one graduate teaching English to children in a university research project. The data were collected in a focus group and socio-discursively analyzed with the concept of voices underlying their answers. The voices identified were predominantly academic as the participants mirrored the knowledge and the discourse they have (had) contact with at the university. This showed full or partial appropriation of such discourses, indicating a language assessment literacy process going on. The findings highlight the tensions between the different kinds of knowledge that should be dealt with in language teacher education and the demands posed by the challenge of assessing children learning languages to the extent that they evidence problems that stem from lack of appropriate literacy assessment for this context. This is definitely a huge challenge in Brazil, as well as in many other places in the world, where undergraduate language courses have not been preparing future teachers to work with assessment.