Unveiling Needs for Grammatical Competence Assessment in a CEFR-Based Curriculum: Empowering Student Involvement in Assessment for Learning in Thailand

Information from the abstract

This study investigated university freshmen’s needs and expectations regarding the assessment of grammatical competence (GC) for communicative use within the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)-aligned communicative language teaching (CLT) and assessment for learning (AfL) frameworks using a mixed methods needs analysis design. Data were collected from 950 first-year students enrolled in a recently implemented CEFR-based compulsory general education curriculum at a leading public university in Bangkok, Thailand. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, directional Likert-scale analysis, Friedman tests, correlational analyses, and thematic analysis of interview data. The findings indicated that students had moderate confidence in their GC and perceived it as a relative weakness that hindered their confidence in communication. Correlational analysis revealed a strong positive relationship between GC and overall communicative competence, underscoring the central role of GC in supporting communication within a CLT framework. Grammar-domain analysis further revealed uneven confidence across GC domains, with particularly low confidence in discourse-dependent structures (e.g., complex sentence relations and cohesive devices) compared with sentence-level forms (e.g., tense and aspect, subject–verb agreement, and basic clause structures). Students also expressed strong learning-oriented expectations for GC assessment. These findings reveal a gap in CLT implementation and provide diagnostic evidence to inform the development of AfL-oriented GC assessment in Thailand’s English as a foreign language (EFL) context.

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Related topics: EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Educational and Psychological Assessments · Second Language Learning and Teaching