Reshaping the EFL Formative Assessment Pedagogy With Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Blockchain technology is a distributed database with features such as no forgery, full traceability, openness, and transparency which is superior in establishing trust mechanisms and brings new opportunities for finance, healthcare, technology, and education. As a required course of all universities in China, College English has a large demographic covering millions of students. But the traditional EFL summative assessment model fails to fully reflect the L2 learner’s learning process and increment performance. The current paper focuses on the novel applications of blockchain in the educational domain and how blockchain technology reshapes the EFL Formative Assessment framework in the consensus mechanism to achieve a decentralized and highly trusted learning process record and evaluation. This innovative approach aims at improving the openness, transparency, and fairness of the EFL learning process by recording and monitoring the teachers’ and students’ behaviors. The research findings of this paper provide preliminary exploration for L2 evaluation and supply some inspiration to policymakers, EFL practitioners, and technology developers about the potential usages of digital credentials anchored on blockchains.