Investigating Teachers’ Attitudes towards the Use of Alternative Assessment in Teaching the Writing Skill:

Abstract

The present descriptive study seeks to investigate the written expression teachers‟ attitudes towards the use of alternative assessment methods in teaching first year license students of English at the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia. It also attempts to discover whether or not the teachers implement alternative assessment in their classes. The study is based on the hypothesis that if the teachers had positive attitudes towards the use of alternative assessment, they would implement it effectively in their classes. The data are collected by means of a questionnaire designed and addressed to twelve teachers of written expression module at the department of English. The study findings showed that though knowledgeable about alternative assessment the teachers were, they did not widely make use of such a new type of assessment, nor was it regular practice in their writing classes. Hence the results rejected the research hypothesis and revealed that despite of the fact that the teachers had positive attitudes towards the use of alternative assessment, they did not implement it widely in their classes. Based on the results obtained, some pedagogical recommendations and suggestions for future research are suggested