184 / 2018-08-14 13:55:10

Standards in Developing ELTCertificate: Constructing an Assessment Use Argument

Standards, ELTCertificate, Assessment Use Argument

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The English Language Teaching Certificate (the ELTCertificate for short) , developed and designed as a significant instrument for China’s ELT assessment, bears great interests in EFL teachers’ education, recruitment, and development. As a standardized assessment, the ELTCertificate strictly complies with standards in language assessment. In close reference to these standards, this study constructs an Assessment Use Argument (Bachman & Palmer, 2010) for its development and justification.
Based on the needs analysis of local ELT practice and the review of relevant theories, the construct of the ELTCertificate is defined as English-for-Teaching and EFL Teaching competencies. Prior to trials, the following research questions need to be solved: (1) How to combine the assessment of English-for-Teaching and EFL Teaching competencies into one test? (2) How to distinct English-for-Teaching competence from EFL teachers’ English proficiency in general? (3) How to make the assessment tasks correspond to the tasks in different ELT phases with their peculiarities. To probe into these questions, we design an overarching test framework to delineate the testing goals, scope and content.
The process of assessment justification provides a basis for accountability. During the process, different specific warrants are articulated and backing is amply collected. Mixed methods like in-depth interviews, colloquiums, symposiums, and many-facet Rasch model, are employed to obtain feedback and inform the development of the assessment. The results indicate that (1) the assessment tasks directly engage the ability stipulated in the construct definition; (2) the characteristics of the assessment tasks corresponded closely to those tasks in the real ELT domains; (3) the EFL teacher competence as specified in this study can be somewhat generalized to the ELT domain in China. However, various revisions are still required to standardize the assessment so as to guarantee fairness and justice.