Investigating EFL Teachers’ Attitudes toward Alternative Assessment

Over the last decades, the widespread view that English is now a lingua franca has increased the prominence of English language teaching methodology and has led to the continuous revision and amendment of pedagogical issues such as language teaching and learning along with testing and assessment. To that end, there has been a considerable emphasis on the alignment of assessment practices with language teaching and learning practices. Accordingly, language assessment, more specifically, alternative assessment has been one of the critical issues that have received much attention in the field of language teaching. This current study, which was conducted quantitatively and qualitatively has aimed to explore the attitudes of teachers of English as a foreign language towards AA methods. The participants of the study, 137 EFL teachers who work in the state primary, secondary and high schools in the province of Samsun in Türkiye, responded to the 5-Likert scale with 15 items developed by İzci et al (2014) in the survey part of the study. For the qualitative phase of the study, 16 teachers consented to be interviewed to answer four open-ended questions. The findings of the study revealed that , in general, the EFL teachers held a positive view on alternative assessment methods. Other findings also showed that their attitudes varied significantly in favour of the teachers who received inservice training, and that the participants also had the view that teachers often face the challenges which impede the use of alternative assessment tools and/or that there are factors which prevent them from implementing these methods efficiently.