Iranian EFL Teachers’ Challenges and Solutions in Using Computer-Assisted Assessment: Exploring EFL Teachers’ Experiential Evidence

Abstract

This chapter examined the Iranian EFL teachers’ challenges with computer-assisted assessment (CAA) and their solutions to such challenges. Through a transcendental phenomenology, we attempted to investigate EFL teachers’ experiential evidence to find the essence of the phenomenon—the challenges and solutions of CAA—from their voices. Hence, we collected autobiographical narratives of four Iranian EFL teachers and analyzed them based on Giori’s five-step framework. The findings showed that EFL teachers’ main challenges in integrating CAA into their classes were the lack of required infrastructures and teachers’ low technological literacy. The findings also indicated that teachers’ main solutions were alternative assessment to CAA, CALL teacher education, developing infrastructures, new identifications of technology, and students’ technological literacy. By analyzing their experiences critically, we found that they cannot distinguish between pedagogical and institutional infrastructures, which could be the origin of many of their challenges. Moreover, concerning their solutions, we found that the accountability of their solutions is not the same in the Iranian context. Finally, we conclude that EFL teacher education programs in general and CALL teacher education programs in particular need to change EFL teachers’ identifications about the concept of infrastructures and simultaneously develop teachers’ technological literacy and autonomy.