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Innovative school-based English Language assessment practices in Singapore

This paper presents the key findings of a doctoral research project which examined how teachers interpreted and managed their English Language (EL) assessment practices under a distinctive policy innovation in Singapore –, the Integrated Programmes (IP), which de-emphasises examinations and encourages greater teacher autonomy to broaden students’, learning. More specifically, the paper describes how teachers worked collaboratively as a school-based community to expand their assessment practices to promote EL learning, and shows that innovative school-based assessment is possible in a supportive context such as the IP, even as the larger educational system is still dominantly influenced by centralised external authorities. The implication of this finding for mainstream schools is also discussed in this paper.The data for this study were collected from two schools. The primary data comprised semi-structured in-depth interviews with eight teacher-participants and was supplemented by ‘,stimulated recall’, of the marking of essays, lesson observations, and document analysis. These methods provided an understanding of teacher-based EL assessment practices from the teacher-participants’, own viewpoints and facilitated the corroboration of the interpretive reality presented by the teacher-participants. The inductive data analysis involved codifying and categorising the interview data, and comparing them with the whole data set using a continual comparison method.

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