Investigating the Written Assessment Practices of Turkish Teachers of English at Primary Education

Abstract

Problem Statement: Since the late 1990s, Turkey has witnessed two major curriculum reforms in English language teaching at the primary level education. However, the situation of the assessment practices of the teachers has been unclear due to lack of relevant research, particularly in Turkish context.
Purpose of Study: This study aims to investigate the written assessment practices of young English language learners in Grades 4-5 in state Turkish primary schools with a focus on comparing the question types posed by the teachers prior to and following the 2005 curriculum innovation in English language teaching (ELT) in primary education in Turkey.
Method: In order to identify the teachers’ written assessment practices, 100 written examination papers were collected from 25 teachers who had been teaching in grades 4 and 5 since 1997, the papers were analyzed with regard to the question types based on the categorization suggested by Brown and Hudson (1998), and descriptive statistics was used in comparing the question types.
Findings: As a result, no major differences were found between the types of questions directed to 4th and 5th graders prior to and following the 2005 curriculum innovation.
Conclusion and Recommendations: Additionally, constructed response question types grew noticeably in number, particularly when the examination papers prepared for 4th and 5th graders were compared prior to and after the 2005 curriculum innovation.