Teachers’ Assessment Literacy and Its Correlation with IELTS Students’ Achievement in Writing Skill

Abstract

The role of teachers in their students’ success is an undeniable factor which has already been dealt with in diverse literature. The challenge is their knowledge pertaining to the scale of their prevailing awareness related to one of the leading issues in the testing domain that is assessment literacy. The aim of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of teachers’ assessment - literacy effectiveness in IELTS writing practice, Task 2, by administrating an in-service training course for a group of teachers instructing IELTS candidates and measuring the effect of their literacy on the writing skill developments of their students. The result shows that those teachers who received the literacy of the IELTS writing assessment procedure have earned consciousness of the genre principles and are more successful in their profession as they are capable of producing more literate learners, who achieve higher scores than their fellow candidates. The findings of the present paper reveals that assessment literates tend to communicate their knowledge through a more effective approach to their students than their colleagues, emphasizing the fact that teachers who try to secure their profession in an optimal manner should equip themselves with the needs of the assessment. Assessment literacy, then, acts as a dual instrument both for the well-being of the teachers in the first step and for the objectively literate students meeting their test demands in the second step.