Dra. Ortiz-Navarrete, Mabel

The study analyses the assessment instruments designed by Chilean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in-service teachers. The participants were 110 secondary school teachers from the central, northern, and southern areas of Chile. The data collection technique was document analysis of the assessment instruments designed in their teaching practices. The results suggest that the most typical instrument is a language test, while speaking/writing performance evaluations with rubrics and rating scales are used to a lesser degree, and all having writing, reading, grammar, and vocabulary as their primary assessment foci. It is suggested that universities and administrators of educational institutions promote opportunities for professional updating regarding language assessment. Moreover, pre-service teacher education needs to emphasize and strengthen this didactic dimension.

The general objective of this study is to analyze the types of items designed by Chilean pre-service EFL teachers to assess listening comprehension skills in English and the cognitive load they experience during the test design process. This study employs a mixed-method design, including 125 Chilean pre-service teachers of English in their third, fourth, and fifth year of professional preparation. As data collection techniques, the participants created a listening comprehension test for secondary education English language learners. Moreover, they completed the Cognitive Load Scale (Leppink et al., 2013). The findings indicate that all pre-service EFL teachers create close and open-ended questions to evaluate students' listening comprehension, focusing on identifying specific information. Fourth and fifth-year pre-service teachers design close and open-ended questions to identify general and specific information, encompassing higher levels of comprehension. On the other hand, regarding the cognitive load experienced by the participants in the test design, they exhibited moderate intrinsic cognitive load, demonstrating that the task was reasonably challenging. The extraneous load was generally low, suggesting minimal external distractions. Notably, the germane load was high across all groups, indicating that the task effectively promoted learning and competency development. Pre-service language teacher education programs should consider these findings to enhance listening assessment practices. Incorporating cognitive load theory can assist teacher candidates in building both pedagogical and disciplinary teaching competencies.

This study addresses the impact of 2 types of written corrective feedback (WCF) on the acquisition of the third person singular -s in English. The study followed a quasi-experimental design: 2 experimental groups and 1 control group that included 57 preservice teachers from a Chilean university. The experimental groups underwent a treatment based on the provision of direct metalinguistic feedback (group 1) and indirect metalinguistic feedback (group 2). The control group did not receive any type of WCF. At the end of the treatment, a posttest was run and, 1 month later, a delayed posttest was given. Finally, a semistructured interview was conducted in order to identify the L2 learners’ perceptions about the provision of WCF through a Wiki environment. There was no significant difference between the experimental groups on the posttest. However, on the delayed test, group 2 outperformed group 1.