assessment-mediated instruction and efl learners’ development of reading comprehension: aal, afl, and aol

Teaching reading comprehension has been a thorny issue in foreign language contexts, stressing the need for more innovative procedures which benefiting from purposeful assessment startegies and interactive learning environment can pave the way for tracking learners' developmental changes. inspired by such an assumption and following a mixed methods design, the present study attempted to investigate the differential effects of assessment-mediated instruction through aal (assessment as learning) and afl (assessment for learning) on iranian intermediate efl learners’ reading comprehension and explore their perceptions. the participants included 75 out of 90 learners who were studying english in a private language institute. they were assigned into aal (n = 25), afl (n = 25), and aol (assessment of learning) (n= 25) groups. the extracts of the learners’ interview data were categorized according to grounded theory methodology (glaser & strauss, 1967). the results of paired samples t-test and one-way anova revealed that the aal and afl groups significantly outperformed the aol group. besides, the aal group performed better than the afl group. moreover, the qualitative investigation of semi-structured interviews acknowledged the quantitative results in the sense that almost all the learners believed in the effective role of 1) assessment-mediated instruction and learners’ active involvement; and 2) assessment-mediated instruction and learners’ eagerly classroom participation. on implication side, l2 teachers are suggested to adopt aal- and afl-mediated instructions in involving learners into assessment procedures, while identifying theie points of strengths and weaknesses. finally, useful recommendations are offered for syllabus design and materials development in efl context.