ANALYZING FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT PRACTICES OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

Formative assessment is one of the most prized methods in our post-industrial and global world. One of the most serious indictments of the traditional evaluative methods of spoken and written English is their essential inadequacies and incompatibilities with the present-day pedagogical trends. Formative assessment in a second language (SL) is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most significant tasks we engage our students in as human beings. It is a mixed method study which employs an evaluative research method. Taking the theoretical framework in mind, the data have been collected to analyze the formative assessment practices in two of the universities of Pakistan, i.e., the National University of Modern Languages and the University of Gujrat. A questionnaire has been constructed, piloted and later on administered to 134 teachers in two of the universities of Pakistan. All teachers of two universities teaching productive skills in various cities of Pakistan participated in the study. To validate the findings of the questionnaire, interviews have also been conducted. On the whole, the findings of the study display that there are many inadequacies in the formative assessment practices of the teachers, and thereby some suggestions have been put forwarded to amend the formative assessment practices of the teachers. 

Keywords: Formative assessment, communicative method, productive skills, Pakistan.