Revisiting Teacher-based Assessment to Enhance EFL Teachers’ Assessment Literacy in South Korea

The study aimed to extend the existing discussion on assessment literacy by focusing on English teachers' ability to implement it in South Korea where a new assessment policy was implemented as part of educational reform. Scholars have pointed out a lack of teachers' assessment knowledge and gaps in their ability to conduct the appropriate assessment for effective instruction. Thus, the scope of teacher assessment literacy needs to include teachers' ability to implement it appropriately in given contexts. Grounding our study in the notion of teacher-based assessment as a guiding framework and using a mixed-methods design, we examined how Korean teachers perceived performance assessment emphasized in the reform and how they put it into practice. One hundred and twenty-seven teachers participated in survey questionnaires and 15 teachers were interviewed as a follow-up. The findings of the study showed that there were discrepancies between the teachers' perceptions of assessment and their assessment practice and that the teachers showed diverse reactions toward teacher-based assessment from being capable to feeling powerless depending on their assessment knowledge and contextual constraints. The study suggests the importance of teachers' agency in assessment literacy as a prerequisite for teacher-based assessment.