محمود دهقان

Being a fully-fledged assessment practitioner seems to be a far-fetched claim among language teachers as the vast majority of surveys have documented their non-conformity to standard assessment principles and practice. Moreover, there seem to be a plethora of discrepancies between what language teachers know about thorough assessment and what they really practice as assessment. To Identify the rationale behind such discrepancies, this qualitative study investigated language teachers’ assessment literacy and practice through critical lenses to fnd out those oppressive powers and political issues that mediate language teachers’ test construction, administration and scoring. Following a phenomenological approach, the present study explored what language teachers have experienced in assessment domain and what contextual factors influence those experiences. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with 10 language teachers along with their reflective essays on assessment practice. According to the emergent themes, the study concludes that commercial orientations, power relations, hegemony of testing companies, lack of testing practitioners’ expertise and their observance of standards are the major obstacles to a thorough assessment practice.