An analysis on EFL teacher professional competences required for test construction: based on the activity of a collaborative test construction in China

Abstract

Teacher assessment competence is one of professional competences that EFL teachers should need in secondary schools. Teachers often use tests for the means of educational assessment especially for classroom and school assessments. This paper aims to uncover EFL secondary school teachers‟ professional competences (TPC) required to write a good test paper or English exercises for students. In addition, this study explores whether the activity of a collaborative test construction (CTC) can improve teachers‟ test construction competence (TCC) or not. The data were collected by administering two questionnaires to two groups of EFL secondary teachers from 5 schools and two interviews conducted to 2 teachers. One group consists of five teachers who participated CTC and the other group of 9 didn‟t. The results indicated a list of 8 professional competences: testing knowledge, linguistic competence, intercultural communicative knowledge, accumulation and utilization of curriculum resources, reflection, computer information technology, pedagogy and a two-way specification table. This study will shed light on a breakthrough on the content of enhancing teachers‟ TCC. Through interviews, the findings also pointed to a positive correlation between improvements of TCC and CTC.