Pre-service language teachers¿ perceptions about language assessment

Assessment is a teacher¿s role as much as teaching is. As Quintero Polo (2011) affirms, evaluation is a continuous activity based on classroom life, an activity that every teacher must carry out; Diaz, Alarcon, and Ortiz (2012) claim that teachers should see assessment as an integrative part of the teaching and learning process. This, however, seems not to be considered by the Colombian educational community when establishing the competences a teacher of English should have. Cárdenas, González and Álvarez (2010) for example, claim that the three pillars all programs for professional development should include are updating of knowledge, innovation, and research. Similarly, Cortés, Cárdenas and Nieto (2013) found that the educational community expects language teachers to have pedagogical and methodological competences, communicative competence, research skills, student-related abilities which allow them to understand and interact with their learners, competences inherent to the teacher¿s self (described as the `magic¿ that teachers could do in class), disciplinary and complementary knowledge, and competences related to the social context. Assessment, however, does not emerge as a component category in the knowledge expected from teachers of English. In a recent study in which the self-assessment reports of pre-service teachers were analyzed, Castañeda-Peña, Rodríguez-Uribe, Salazar-Sierra, and Chala-Bejarano (2016) did not find evaluation, assessment or testing as meaningful pedagogical aspects worth mentioning by these students during their practicum period. These teachers-to-be described issues pertaining the planning of lessons and several aspects related to actions carried out during the teaching itself as meaningful, but evaluation was not noted as a significant pedagogical aspect. In this same research, Rodríguez-Uribe et al. (2018, in revision) found narrative events (although very few) in students¿ self-assessments where evaluation was mentioned as an instance of transfer of learning. Given this apparent lack of attention paid to assessment literacy as a crucial process in the teaching and learning of any subject, we consider that it is vital to explore the perceptions of language assessment of pre-service teachers in the BA in Modern Languages at PUJ.