چكيده به لاتين
In 2012, Ministry of education of Iran adopted communicative approach to teaching foreign languages, including English, which has entailed great changes in instructional and testing realms. With regard to this reform, in-service high school teachers need to implement their teaching and testing practices based on the principles of communicative language testing (CLT). The purposes of this study were to investigate (a) in-service senior high school teachers' communicative literacy and practices of CLT, (b) the relationship among teachers’ knowledge, belief, challenges, and practice, and (c) the contribution of teachers’ knowledge, belief, and challenges to teachers’ communicative testing practices. To this end, 91 teachers across the country participated in this study and answered the five questionnaires and four open-ended questions. The results showed that (a) in-service senior high school teachers had acceptable knowledge and belief about the characteristics and implementation of communicative testing; however, they could not design CLT tests successfully, because they suffered from different challenges of top-down policy and lack of training programs. In addition, the largest positive correlation was found between knowledge and belief, while the lowest negative one was found between practice and challenges. The results also showed that the most contribution was related to that of belief to practice, while the lowest one was related to teachers’ challenges to the practice. In order to empower in-service senior high school teachers to develop their knowledge and practices of communicative testing, teacher educators and policy makers are recommended to hold workshops and training courses on CLT for in-service high school teachers.
