The aims of 2009 Revised National English Curriculum are to help learners get interested and confident in learning English, enhance their communicative competence and acquire intercultural awareness. Educators working at schools make an effort in achi... The aims of 2009 Revised National English Curriculum are to help learners get interested and confident in learning English, enhance their communicative competence and acquire intercultural awareness. Educators working at schools make an effort in achieving these goals through well-planned teaching and follow-up evaluation process in which learners can obtain some feedback for self-development. Though a variety of tests are frequently done in order to measure learners’ knowledge levels and determine whether or not they have successfully attained the objectives in the field of education, testing only focuses on measuring learners’ academic achievement in terms of scores or other observable means. Evaluation is, however, a broader concept which includes the process of making judgements with collected data from various tools for measurement. Given that learners have been exposed to diverse forms of evaluation for years, this study proposed three research questions in order to explore their perceptions about English evaluation; First, how differently do middle school learners perceive traditional -pencil English tests, which are regularly given at schools in terms of gender, learners’ language proficiency and schools? Second, how differently do middle school learners perceive English performance-based assessment in terms of gender, learners’ language proficiency and schools? Third, what would be proper and effective evaluation for middle school English learners? To examine the research questions above, a total of 400 learners from 4 different schools in Seoul were selected as subjects for the survey which focused on learners’ thoughts in relation to current ways of English evaluation system, language skills, affective domains, relevance with lessons, parental influence, etc. The survey included 41 questions in the Likert-type format, which ranged from strongly agree(5) to strongly disagree(1) and also 6 open-ended questions. In addition to the survey, in-depth interviews with 14 learners from one school were employed so as to investigate their detailed perceptions on English tests and performance-based assessment. The gender difference was analyzed through the use of independent t-test, One-way ANOVA was also conducted to identify perception with regard to language proficiency levels(high, intermediate, low) and types of schools. The results of this study showed that the female learners in the survey showed positive attitude towards the benefits of evaluation and were more sensitive to the results of it. However, they appeared more vulnerable and felt more psychological burden caused by evaluation process as well. This study also reaffirmed the fact that groups with high and intermediate levels were relatively more motivated than those in the low level in learning English. It was also found that another variable of schools played a critical role in learners’ perceptions on English evaluation. Lastly, learners considered making the most of the opportunity of reviewing what they’ve learned and considered knowing current learning outcomes as the utmost advantage of evaluation. On the other hand, they insisted there should be more suitable levels of test tasks and the content relevance in existing tests or assessments. Based on the research results above, this study suggests it is critical for educators to come up with well-informed lessons designed to facilitate learners’ creativity and enhance their communicative competence through constructing better evaluation tasks. Considering the fact that learners are often guided to memorize passages or words in the text in order to obtain satisfying test scores under the rigid and time-constrained exams, educators should help learners to raise their awareness of using more process-oriented English learning and ongoing evaluation methods. Moreover, learners’ values, critical viewpoints and contextual meanings for what they’re doing and learning in the field of education should be respected in the evaluation procedure. Additionally, gender and learners’ proficiency should be taken into consideration in line with dynamic assessment principles to encourage learners to maximize the quality exposures in learning English through active interaction and positive washback on the result of taking tests. It is clear that learners’ learning experience is closely related to practitioners’ professionalism or competency in evaluating learners. In other words, English educators should engage in active discussion with other teachers or administrator at school to find ways to utilize more diverse evaluation tools for secondary learners of English. The limitation of this study is that the number of participants for the survey were only 400 middle school students from 4 different schools located in Seoul. Furthermore, the interview was designed to explore learner’s in-depth perceptions on evaluation with only 14 male students from one school. Therefore, it is essential to design further detailed research in consideration of regions, genders, learners’ proficiency, schools, and educators.
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