EFL classroom assessment: Teachers practice and teaching techniques adjustment in Ethiopia

Abstract

The study investigated the practice of classroom assessment in adjusting English language teachers’ teaching techniques. It specifically examined the classroom assessment techniques teachers employed in the classroom, for what purpose they used, the kinds of feedbacks they obtained while they assess their students using different classroom assessment techniques, and whether they used the feedbacks to adjust their teaching techniques or not. Twenty one English language teachers from three secondary schools participated in the study. The study employed both quantitative and qualitative data. Percentage and frequency have been used to analyze the quantitative data; whereas the qualitative data have been categorized into themes for further analysis. The result of the quantitative data revealed that English language teachers used the assessment techniques for three purposes: assessment of learning, assessment for learning, assessment as learning which contradict with the result of qualitative data (interview and lesson observation), where most of the teachers used assessment for the purpose of assessment of learning. The qualitative result further showed that most of the English language teachers hardly ever used the feedbacks from the classroom assessments in adjusting their teaching techniques. Thus, it is recommended that English language teachers need to use classroom assessment techniques properly to improve students’ performance by adjusting their teaching techniques according to the purposes of classroom assessments.