© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. What does language assessment literacy mean to teachers? Vivien Berry, Susan Sheehan, and Sonia Munro Language assessment literacy has been discussed by language assessment specialists since Davies’ seminal 2008 article. Much of this discussion has focused on experts’ opinions of what teachers know, do not know, and should know about assessment. This paper reports on a project which aimed to put teachers at the centre of the debate by exploring their attitudes to assessment and their assessment practices. Interviews, classroom observations with follow-up interviews, and focus group discussions were held with teachers based in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. The teachers discussed their training in assessment and their attitudes towards it. Although many of them expressed a lack of confidence in their knowledge of the subject, the teachers we observed in fact successfully deployed a wide range of assessment techniques. However, they tended to characterize these as teaching activities and, therefore, part of good teaching practice. Testing and grading were viewed negatively. In her influential article on testing and assessment, Clapham (2000: 150) comments that: ‘[A]ssessment is used both as a general umbrella term to cover all methods of testing and assessment and as a term to distinguish alternative assessment from testing.’ Similarly, Clapham proposes a distinction between ‘testers’ who design and deliver reliable and valid high- stakes tests and ‘assessors’ who prepare real-life communicative tasks for their students, even though she acknowledges that the two terms are often used interchangeably by experts, herself included. If we accept Clapham’s distinctions, classroom teachers fit more obviously into the category of assessors concerned with assessment than of testers concerned with testing. Effective assessment can support and promote learning, and therefore a teacher’s ability to engage with a range of teaching, learning, and assessment practices is essential. As Crusan, Plakans, and Gebril (2016) suggest, it is the students who lose out if assessment practices are poor. However, concerns have been expressed about the level and quality of teacher training in assessment (Fulcher 2012; Crusan et al. 2016). In general education, the term assessment literacy has been used to describe the knowledge teachers should have about assessment. The term has been adapted and adopted by experts in language assessment, with Malone proposing the following definition of language assessment literacy: Introduction ELT Journal Volume 73/2 April 2019; doi:10.1093/elt/ccy055 113 Advance Access publication February 9, 2019 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eltj/article/73/2/113/5310453 by guest on 08 September 2022