EFL TEACHING PRACTICES UNDER THE WASHBACK OF HIGH-STAKES TESTS: WHAT ASPECTS ARE AFFECTED?

Tóm tắt

Washback, or the effects of tests on learning and teaching, is one of the important test qualities (Bachman & Palmer, 1996). There have been a few empirical studies on the washback of different tests on different stakeholders and their actions under the test use such as those by Brown (1997), Cheng (1997), McKinley & Thompson (2018), Nguyen (2017), Pizarro (2010), Shih (2009), Xu & Liu (2018), to name but a few. The results of such studies have shown that the washback of different tests varies in terms of mechanism, direction, and intensity of teaching and learning. This study explores the washback of the high-stakes English tests in the Vietnamese National High School Graduation Exam on the teaching of EFL high school teachers. Six teachers, who were teaching English to students at grade 12 in the research site of Buon Ma Thuot City (Dak Lak Province, Vietnam) were purposefully selected for the study. As a case study, the research employed was a two-phase explanatory design with the use of a questionnaire and follow-up interviews. The findings reveal that various aspects of teaching, such as the teachers’ choices of textbook coverage, time allotment for teaching content, provision of extracurricular content, in-class assessment tasks, their choices of teaching methods, application of new teaching techniques, choices of classroom organization and language for instructions were affected by the high—stakes English tests. In addition, the study discloses the unique teacher factors of the participants under the influence of the tests.