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A Micro-analytic Investigation into a Practice of Informal Formative Assessment in L2 Classroom Interaction

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Classroom-based Conversation Analytic Research

Part of the book series: Educational Linguistics ((EDUL,volume 46))

Abstract

Formative Assessment (FA) in L2 classrooms has been reconceptualized in theory as it is now recognized that it is locally situated, dynamic and co-constructed in classroom interaction and is as much an informal process as a formal one. This study adopts the term “informal formative assessment” to refer to any of those FA practices that are embedded into everyday learning activities and that emerge in and through classroom interaction contingently, continuously and flexibly. It is different from formal FA, which is carried out at pre-specified times through specially designed assessment instruments. Despite the reconceptualization of FA in theory, how FA emerges informally in practice in naturally-occurring classroom interaction has not been investigated adequately. Moreover, there is a gap between classroom interaction research, which does not discuss the relevance of its findings to FA practices, and classroom-based assessment research, which neglects the role of classroom interaction in assessment practices with a greater focus on formal FA practices. In order to address this gap, this conversation-analytic study illustrates how FA informally emerges as an interactional practice in an L2 classroom through the phenomenon called “Reference to a Past Learning Event” (RPLE) and claims that such assessment practices constitute an important component of Classroom Interactional Competence. RPLE occurs when the teacher contingently extends the main instructional activity to refer to language items and topics presented in a past learning event. The teacher does this in order to check students’ knowledge and/or to deal with trouble sources in their learning states in and through classroom interaction. Data are presented from a corpus of video-recordings of an EFL class (55 classroom hours) in a preparatory school at a Turkish state university. The analysis shows that RPLE emerges as a practice of informal FA in teacher turns and reveals the complexity of informal FA which is not simply about providing feedback but is dynamic and co-constructed in classroom interaction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The teacher’s use of L1 Turkish as well as L2 English in this excerpt and the one that follows are examples of language alternation (see Filipi and Markee 2018). See also Sert this volume, and Kunitz this volume, which deal more explicitly with this phenomenon.

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Acknowledgement

This study comes from a PhD thesis that was submitted to Middle East Technical University (Can Daşkın 2017) and is based on a larger project that received a grant from TÜBİTAK (project number: 114 K616). I would like to thank my PhD supervisor Prof. Dr. Çiler Hatipoğlu, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Olcay Sert for their invaluable feedback and guidance. Special thanks to the internal and external reviewers for their feedback and suggestions which contributed to the improvement of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Foreign Language Education & HUMAN Research Centre, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

    Nilüfer Can Daşkın

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  1. Nilüfer Can Daşkın
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Silvia Kunitz

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Numa Markee

  3. School of Education, Culture and Communication, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

    Olcay Sert

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Can Daşkın, N. (2021). A Micro-analytic Investigation into a Practice of Informal Formative Assessment in L2 Classroom Interaction. In: Kunitz, S., Markee, N., Sert, O. (eds) Classroom-based Conversation Analytic Research. Educational Linguistics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52193-6_17

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