TY - JOUR
T1 - Community of assessment practice or interests
T2 - The case of EAP writing assessment
AU - Al-Maamari, Faisal
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Setting, disseminating and applying assessment standards are part of university academic programmes of study. Nowadays, assessment is increasingly viewed from a social practice perspective, and so doing entails exploring how the quality of assessment is shaped by interaction and co-participation with different communities of practice. Therefore, based on this perspective, the study reported here aimed to examine the assessment policies and practices of laboratory report writing of first year students in credit-bearing, English for Special Purposes programmes at a university in the Sultanate of Oman. Interviews of programme administrators and the instructors plus institutional and programme documents were examined to investigate these assessment policies and practices. The programme administrators were asked about how they planned the written assessment in their programmes, and the instructors were asked about their experiences of these assessments. The data were then analysed thematically using community of practice framework, namely in relation to (1) a shared repertoire of communal resources, (2) mutual engagement, and (3) a sense of joint enterprise. It was found that instead of community of practice, there were (sub)communities of practices wherein interaction, negotiation and communication amongst members and non-members were punctuated by control, power and autonomy, all working with the aim of narrowing the range between the personal goals of the academic and the communal goals of the institution. The overarching conclusion is that in their assessment practices, the two instructional programmes exhibited varying degrees of community of practice based on the above three attributes.
AB - Setting, disseminating and applying assessment standards are part of university academic programmes of study. Nowadays, assessment is increasingly viewed from a social practice perspective, and so doing entails exploring how the quality of assessment is shaped by interaction and co-participation with different communities of practice. Therefore, based on this perspective, the study reported here aimed to examine the assessment policies and practices of laboratory report writing of first year students in credit-bearing, English for Special Purposes programmes at a university in the Sultanate of Oman. Interviews of programme administrators and the instructors plus institutional and programme documents were examined to investigate these assessment policies and practices. The programme administrators were asked about how they planned the written assessment in their programmes, and the instructors were asked about their experiences of these assessments. The data were then analysed thematically using community of practice framework, namely in relation to (1) a shared repertoire of communal resources, (2) mutual engagement, and (3) a sense of joint enterprise. It was found that instead of community of practice, there were (sub)communities of practices wherein interaction, negotiation and communication amongst members and non-members were punctuated by control, power and autonomy, all working with the aim of narrowing the range between the personal goals of the academic and the communal goals of the institution. The overarching conclusion is that in their assessment practices, the two instructional programmes exhibited varying degrees of community of practice based on the above three attributes.
KW - Assessment standards
KW - Community of practice
KW - Laboratory report
KW - Oman EAP
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U2 - 10.17509/ijal.v5i2.1351
DO - 10.17509/ijal.v5i2.1351
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84962132771
SN - 2301-9468
VL - 5
SP - 272
EP - 281
JO - Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics
JF - Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics
IS - 2
ER -