Development and Validation of Language Assessment Literacy Scale for High School EFL Teachers: A Mixed Methods Approach

Teachers need to keep up to date with a set of clear and common expectations and formidable challenges that arise in classroom assessment practices. Defining and conceptualizing of language assessment literacy have been the subject of much debate, especially with regard to detecting and defining the main components of language assessment literacy for language teachers (Levi & Inbar-Lourie, 2019). The main aim of the study was to pinpoint and define the main comments of LAL in the EFL context of Iran. The researchers conducted semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews with high school EFL teachers, and reviewed existing literature, documents on language assessment literacy as well as utilized the grounded theory approach to explore EFL teachers’ perception and insights into language assessment literacy and define the main components of language assessment literacy based on the EFL teachers' perceptions. The proposed model consists of three elements, namely awareness of language pedagogy, assessment principles and interpretation, assessment policy and local practices. In the second stage of the present study, to ensure reliability and validity of the scale, 203 Iranian EFL teachers with the age range between 22 to 55 were asked to complete the newly-developed instrument. Finally, to measure the EFL teachers’ language assessment literacy, 41 five-point Likert-scale items were developed. Based on all validation and statistical procedures, the newly-developed scale can be considered a valuable tool for measuring high school EFL teachers’ language assessment literacy.