INTRODUCTION

THE ARC OF ASSESSMENT

Assessment, like many aspects of second language teacher education, is changing. Several factors are driving the change, among them how we understand the work of teaching generally, language teaching in particular, and more fundamentally the role of teachers’ knowledge in teaching. There are also issues of identity and practice: who teachers are and what they are expected to teach in the face of changing student demographics, all of which are redefining theoretical frameworks for assessing knowledge-in-action. Thus, what might, at one point, have seemed like a straightforward notion – documenting what teachers know as language teachers – is becoming increasingly complex. When that knowledge was seen as unitary – knowing about language, its grammar, form, and uses – then assessing it could be equally straightforward: it was simply a matter of testing teachers’ knowledge of content.

However, this formula – that content could equal competence – belied the messy complexity of language teaching itself. The challenge with language teaching is that teachers use language to teach language, so knowledge in language teaching is actually a dual phenomenon: It must relate (or blend) content and process in and through language. Language is the basis of the lesson – what the teacher is teaching – and it is the means of teaching it – how the teacher teaches that lesson. Added to this complexity is the more general challenge of assessing teaching as an activity: whether to document its processes (what the teacher is doing), its outcomes (what the students appear to have learned), or some combination of the two. There are also key choices to be made in assembling such documentation: whether the records are grounded externally in visible practices or combine, or indeed are based in, the teacher’s self-assessment of their work.

The confluence all of these challenges and issues make the question of assessment in second language teacher education a rich, complex, and shifting enterprise. We gather these complexities under what we call the arc of assessment, to capture the way these concerns, and indeed the central question of how best to document what language teachers know and do in relation to their own and their students’ learning, are shifting over time.