iranian efl teachers’ perspectives and preferences toward language assessment

Teachers’ perspectives and preferences have played an important role in addressing the issue of language assessment and several studies have documented its importance clearly. however, it appears that previous studies of assessment have not dealt with the relationship between iranian efl teachers’ perspectives and preferences. furthermore, the contribution of assessment has received little attention within demographic scope. the main objective of this paper was first to investigate teachers’ perspectives and preferences regarding language assessment. the second purpose was to address a neglected aspect of correlation between iranian efl teachers’ perspectives and preferences. finally, this research sought to understand and explain the role of demographic information in both teachers’ perspectives and preferences in further analyses. in order to carry out the research, two questionnaires were employed including the classroom assessment preferences survey questionnaire for language teachers (capsq-lt) by gonzales and aliponga (2012) in addition to teacher assessment for learning questionnaire (tafl-q) developed by pat-el,tillema, segers and vedder(2013) and were distributed among 43 english language teachers working at three private language institutes in gorgan, iran. the research indicated that iranian efl teachers’ perspective was higher toward monitoring scale than scaffolding. analysis of teachers’ preferences also revealed that assessment as learning hit the highest place among other scales. most important of all, the findings showed that the iranian efl teachers’ perspectives and preferences were highly correlated in the current study.