Self-assessment of writing skills: A comparative study on teacher assessment and self-assessment of prospective efl teachers' writing skills and their perceptions of self-assessment

This study aims to investigate the prospective EFL teachers' perceptions on self-assessment; accordingly, their conceptualization of self-assessment, attitudes towards and perceived benefits of practicing self-assessment of their writing skills. In addition, the study also aims to find out the level of consistency of the prospective EFL teachers' self-assessment of their writing skills with the teacher assessment in general and regarding different components of writing skills. The study was designed as convergent parallel mixed method research including a group of freshman students enrolled in a Writing Skills 2 course in an ELT program. The participants were administered a self-assessment questionnaire both before and after including self-assessment practices to their essay writing tasks to elicit their views and experiences considering the use of self-assessment, and a self-assessment rubric to determine whether there is a significant difference between prospective EFL teachers' self-assessment and the teacher assessment scores. While the qualitative data obtained from the self-assessment questionnaire were analyzed via multiple-phased systematic content analysis, the quantitative including prospective EFL teachers' self-and the teacher- assessments were analyzed using SPSS. The results show that freshman prospective EFL teachers who participated in the study had limited level "self-assessment literacy" and lacked the awareness of and experience in using self-assessment to improve their English writing skills. The data analyses also reveal that the freshmen prospective EFL teachers' conceptualization of self-assessment as a skill that can be developed through guided applications on a regular basis and have positive attitudes towards practicing self-assessment in their writing classes and using self-assessment in their future assessment practices. Besides, practicing self-assessment is shown not only to improve prospective EFL teachers' writing skills but also their language assessment literacy skills. For this reason, prospective EFL teachers suggested teacher educators to incorporate self-assessment practices into their curriculum to promote their students' understanding of the concept of formative assessment and writing assessment. Moreover, while the results show that there is no statistically significant difference between prospective EFL teachers' self-assessment scores and the instructor's scores in assessing their writing skills considering final scores, there is a significant difference between the self- and instructor assessment scores regarding different components of writing skills.