A comparative analysis of teachers' beliefs and practices on the assessment of 4th grade-efl students in Turkey, Italy and Finland

With the recent changes in Turkish educational system, English language teaching program has been redesigned taking the learners' needs into consideration. The new curriculum focuses on communicative skills more and includes some methods such as student portfolio, self-assessment and peer-assessment for evaluation. However, in the studies from Turkey and different parts of the world, the results indicate that in the assessment of young learners' foreign language competence, the content of tests is still based on grammar and vocabulary items and most of the assessments ignore listening and speaking skills. The aim of this study is to find out what foreign language teachers' beliefs and practices are with regard to the assessment of primary school EFL students and discover whether there are matches or mismatches between the expected quality of assessment and the reality in Turkey, Finland and Italy. A total of 89 English teachers in Turkey, 40 English teachers in Italy and 41 English teachers in Finland constituted the sample of the study. For data collection, a questionnaire consisting of two main parts and a semi-structured interview with ten open-ended questions were used. The qualitative data obtained through interviews were subjected to content analysis whereas the quantitative data collected through the questionnaire were analyzed by using frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation and one-way ANOVA. The results of the study indicated that the use of assessment practices of teachers varied across countries according to the curriculum and the book they followed, their beliefs, classroom size, students' characteristics and the materials. Despite its variety from classroom to classroom in different countries, the difficulties teachers face in assessing young learners were mainly stemmed from learning environment, instructional technology and material, students, parent perception, class hours and assessment tools. Also, according to the analysis of the interviews, teachers tended to use ready-to-use exams taken from the course books as well as additional materials for the exams and most of the teachers suggested that using formative types of assessment were more appropriate for young learners.