MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HUE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES NGUYEN THI HONG DUYEN AN INVESTIGATION INTO HIGH SCHOOL EFL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS AND PRACTICES OF ASSESSING LEARNERS AT SOME HIGH SCHOOLS IN THUA THIEN HUE PROVINCE, VIETNAM DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING HUE, 2021 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HUE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES NGUYEN THI HONG DUYEN AN INVESTIGATION INTO HIGH SCHOOL EFL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS AND PRACTICES OF ASSESSING LEARNERS AT SOME HIGH SCHOOLS IN THUA THIEN HUE PROVINCE, VIETNAM DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING CODE: 9 14 01 11 SUPERVISOR: Assoc. PHAM THI HONG NHUNG HUE, 2021 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS. i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. vii LIST OF TABLES.
ix LIST OF CHARTS .x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. Rationale of the study. Research aim and questions. Scope of the study.
Significance of the study. Structure of the thesis. Classroom assessment in language learning. Definitions of classroom assessment.
Types of classroom assessment. Procedures of classroom assessment. Purposes of classroom assessment. Principles of classroom assessment.
Classroom assessment of high school language learners. Characteristics of high school learners. Principles of assessing high school language learners. Selecting assessment tasks and tools.
Delivering feedback on assessment results. Relationship between teachers‟ perceptions and practices of assessing learners. Influential factors on teachers‟ assessment of language learners. High school English language education and assessment in Vietnam.
High school English language curriculum. Before the launch of the National Foreign Languages Project. After the launch of the National Foreign Languages Project. The pilot English language curriculum.
The official English language curriculum. Language assessment for high school learners in Vietnam. Language assessment context. Language assessment policy.
For the pilot English language curriculum. For formative assessment. For summative assessment. For the official English language curriculum.
Previous studies on teachers' classroom assessment. Teachers‟ perceptions of classroom assessment. Teachers‟ practices of classroom assessment. Teachers‟ perceptions and practices of classroom assessment.
Data collection instruments. Semi-structured interviews. Data collection procedures. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION.
EFL teachers‟ perceptions of assessing high school language learners. EFL teachers‟ defining formative and summative assessment. EFL teachers‟ perceptions of assessment purposes. Learning and teaching improvement.
EFL teachers‟ perceptions of major principles of assessing language learners. Principles of selecting assessment tasks and tools. Principles of providing feedback from assessment results. EFL teachers‟ practices of assessing high school language learners.
Findings from reflective data. Purposes of assessment in practice. Making use of assessment results for diagnosing learning. Making use of assessment for improving learning and teaching.
Making use of assessment results to account for teacher instruction. Making use of formative assessment to prepare learners for summative tests. EFL teachers‟ use of assessment types and tools in the classroom assessment. Assessment tools in formative assessment.
Assessment tools in summative assessment. Findings from assessment samples. Formative assessment samples. Summative assessment samples.
The relationship between teachers' perceptions and practices in language classroom assessment. Teachers‟ perceptions and practices of assessment purposes. Teachers‟ perceptions and practices of assessment principles. Teachers‟perceptions and practices of selecting assessment tasks and tools .2 Teachers‟ perceptions and practices of feedback delivery.
Influential factors in teachers' assessment of language learners. Summary of key findings. High school EFL teachers' perceptions of assessing language learners. High school EFL teachers' practices of assessing language learners.
The relationship between teachers' perceptions and practices of assessing language learners .4 Influential factors in teachers‟ classroom assessment. Teachers‟ use of assessment tools in the classroom. For educational managers. Theoretical and practical contributions to the study.
Limitations of the study. Recommendations for further studies. English Version of Questionnaire. Vietnamese version of the questionnaire.
English version of The Interview Questions. Vietnamese Version of The Interview Questions. Transcript of The Interview. Assessment Samples And Matrices.
The pilot English curriculum .183 iv STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I certify my authorship of the PhD thesis submitted today entitled: “An investigation into High School EFL Teachers’ Perceptions and Practices of Assessing Learners at some High Schools in Thua Thien Hue Province, Vietnam” for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education, is the result of own my research. This thesis has not been submitted for a higher degree at any other institutions. To the best of my knowledge, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by other people except where the references are made in the thesis itself. Author‟s signature Nguyen Thi Hong Duyen v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It would have been impossible to complete this study without significant support and expertise from many people.
I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge my sincere gratitude to all those concerned. My wholehearted appreciation goes to my supervisor, Assoc. Pham Thi Hong Nhung, for her patience, encouragement, sympathy, and tireless support during my Ph. I would like to say thanks to my lecturers and my colleagues at Hue University of Foreign Languages for their wholehearted support and guidance.
I wish to express my deep gratitude to the nice teacher participants from sixteen high schools in Thua Thien Hue for spending their valuable time to share with me the information for this study. I would like to thank my parents, my parents-in-law, and my sisters. Without their unconditioned support, I could not have concentrated on my study. Finally, I would like to say thanks to my husband, my daughter, and my son, for their love, patience and support.
vi ABSTRACT Teachers‟ perceptions of classroom assessment play a significant role in their effective classroom assessment practices as teachers have a tendency to bring into their practices what they understand about classroom assessment. It has also been proved from previous studies that teachers are unable to practise classroom assessment effectively without relevant knowledge of the situation they are giving instructions. Therefore, the present research was conducted (1) to investigate high school EFL teachers‟ perceptions of assessing learners, (2) to explore how they practice assessing learners in the classroom, and (3) to examine the relationship between teachers‟ perceptions and practices of classroom assessment. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were two main research instruments.
A corpus of assessment samples including formative assessment in various formats and of different lengths and summative assessment papers was also accumulated and analysed to provide an insight into EFL teachers‟ practices of their classroom assessment. The study had three key findings relevant to the three research questions. First, the findings investigating EFL teachers' perceptions of assessing language learners showed that the investigated teachers had positive perceptions of assessment purposes, in which each level of perceptions varied with the highest mean value given to the diagnostic function and the lowest to teacher accountability. In teachers‟ perceptions of major principles of assessing language learners, the findings indicated that teachers' positive perceptions of all essential principles of assessing high school learners varied with the highest given to feedback delivery and the lowest to the selection of assessment tools.
This was to say, providing learners with feedback for learners‟ learning improvement was seen as the primary purpose of classroom assessment. Second, the findings for teachers‟ practices showed that teachers practiced assessing learners frequently. Among the four constructs, assessing language learners for learning diagnosis was the most frequently practiced. Simultaneously, teachers also implemented practices of assessing language learners for examination vii preparation reflecting the reality of teaching to the tests and the impact of standardized and high-stake tests on teachers and learners.
The findings also reflected the reality of classroom assessment in which the teachers emphasized summative assessment over formative assessment though in their perceptions, they understood that formative assessment plays an essential role in improving learning and teaching quality with timely and effective feedback. Third, generally, the high school EFL teachers' perceptions of assessing language learners were positive, proving that the teachers were well-informed with knowledge of the English curriculum, with official documents including policies/guidelines and facilities in the implementation of assessing language learners. However, the mean value for their practices was not as high as that for their perceptions proving that their practices were not aligned with their perceptions. The inconsistency in the relationship between the teachers‟ perceptions and practices of assessing high school language learners showed a considerable influence of internal and external factors on their perceptions and practices.
The study has made some significant theoretical and practical contributions to the field of the study. In theory, the study has confirmed the interrelationship relationship between teachers‟ perceptions and practices. Second, the study has also confirmed the global tendency of implementing formative assessment and summative assessment by EFL teachers in the classroom assessment. In practice, the study has provided an understanding of what high school EFL teachers perceive the classroom assessment and how they implement learner assessment in their classroom practice.
Influential factors in teachers‟ classroom assessment have also been presented to provide more insights into this relationship. viii LIST OF TABLES Table 3. Demographic information of the teacher participants. Summary of the data collection instruments.
Summary of the questionnaire. EFL teachers‟ defining of formative and summative assessment. Assessment for learning diagnosis. Assessment for learning and teaching improvement.
Assessment for teacher accountability. EFL teachers‟ principles of selecting assessment tasks. EFL teachers‟ principles of selecting assessment tools. EFL teachers‟ principles of providing feedback.
Summary of the teachers‟ perceptions of assessment. Using assessment results for learning diagnosis. Using assessment results for learning and teaching improvement. Using assessment results for teacher accountability.
Using formative assessment for summative tests. Artefacts of formative assessment and learners' results. Artefacts of summative assessment and learners' results .98 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 4. EFL teachers‟ perceptions of assessment purposes.
EFL teachers‟ perceptions of major assessing principles. EFL teachers‟ practices of assessment. Frequency of formative assessment tools. Frequency of summative assessment tools.
EFL teachers‟ perceptions and practices of assessment purposes .108 x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CLT : Communicative Language Teaching DOET : Department of Education and Training EFL : English as a foreign language ELLs : English language learners MOET : Ministry of Education and Training TI : Teacher interviewee xi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION The present chapter provides the rationale of the study and describes the major components of the thesis. It starts by presenting the main reasons for conducting the study, research aim and questions. The chapter also discusses the scope and significance of the current study.
It ends with a description of the organization of the thesis. Rationale of the study Globalization in various social, economic, cultural, and educational aspects has made English the preferred foreign language in various Asian contexts (Nunan, 2003). Accordingly, the emergence of English as a global language has made English the most popular foreign language at all educational levels in Vietnam, especially since the implementation of the national socio-economic reform policy known as Doi moi in 1986 (Hoang, 2011; Nguyen, 2011; Pham, 2013). English has been learned and taught all over the country, and the demands for promoting the study of English and bettering the quality of English teaching have emerged.
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is currently the most preferred teaching innovation by many Asian countries (Barnard & Nguyen, 2010; Butler, 2011) so that this approach has become the cornerstone to language education policy in several Asian countries (Mustapha & Yahaya, 2013). Changes in teachers' roles, teaching methods, curriculum design have been made to align with a communicative language teaching and learning approach so that learners can use language communicatively.