An Investigation into Formative Assessment Literacy of Pre-service and In-service EFL Teachers

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the study of Formative assessment (FA) in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Several attempts have been made to examine the FA strategies used by language teachers from various backgrounds as well as their effect on the language teaching process. However, previous studies have overlooked the Turkish EFL teachers’ Formative assessment literacy (FAL) levels owing to the difficulty in finding a reliable scale for the measurement and the predominant state of summative assessment (SA). With this respect, this study aims to achieve a broader understanding of FAL levels of both pre-service and in-service teachers touching upon variables such as gender, age, teaching experience, department of graduation, and postgraduate education for in-service teachers, and year of study for pre-service teachers. A mixed methods research methodology with an explanatory sequential design was adopted in this study. For the quantitative phase, 75 EFL instructors and 154 EFL 3rd and 4th grade students from different universities were contacted to fill in the validated FAL scale from the work of Yan and Pastore (2022). For the qualitative part, 5 instructors and 6 pre-service teachers were invited for semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that in-service teachers demonstrate higher FAL levels compared to pre-service teachers. Furthermore, in comparison to their counterparts, in-service teachers aged 51 and above and teachers with a work experience over 31 years showed a slightly reduced level of FAL. The findings also underscore the necessity for enhanced pre-service training to improve FA implementation.