Dra. Ortiz-Navarrete, Mabel

This exploratory case study investigates the emotional responses, professional accountability, and action-taking dispositions of 150 Chilean prospective English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers towards language assessment scenarios. Despite the growing interest in assessment, little research has focused on the affective experiences of trainee teachers. Participants completed the Emotionally Loaded Situations Questionnaire, which assessed their reactions to situations where students fail language assessments. The study reveals that these situations elicited negative emotional responses, leading to a diminished sense of teacher identity due to perceived inefficiencies in teaching and assessment practices. The findings also highlight the teachers’ dispositions towards taking corrective actions, such as revisiting teaching and assessment strategies, reinforcing assessment content, and improving future practices. As to professional accountability, trainee teachers acknowledge that their teaching performance has a direct effect on their students’ assessment results. These outcomes emphasize the need for further research on the affective dimension in language assessment to better support the professional development of future teachers.

This paper reports on a study about the rhetoric, metacognitive, and cognitive strategies pre-service teachers use before and after a process-based writing intervention when completing an argumentative essay. The data were collected through two think-aloud protocols while 21 Chilean English as a foreign language pre-service teachers completed an essay task. The findings show that strategies such as summarizing, reaffirming, and selecting ideas were only evidenced during the post intervention essay, without the use of communication and socio-affective strategies in either of the two essays. All in all, a process-based writing intervention does not only influence the number of times a strategy is used, but also the number of students who employs strategies when writing an essay—two key considerations for the devising of any writing program.