Aligning Alternative Assessment with Curriculum Design and Teaching Practices: The Case of Communicative English Skills Course at Three Ethiopian Universities

Abstract

The current study set out to investigate the alignment of alternative assessment (AA) with the communicative English skills course (CESC) curriculum design and the CESC teaching practices at three Ethiopian universities. Employing a mixed-methods design, it was guided by three research questions. The study utilised summative content data and quantitative content data, and subjected them to descriptive statistics, and Mann-Whitney U Test and Kruskal-Wallis Test. Some of its main results are worth mentioning. Firstly, out of a total of 632 assessment items in CESC, only 30.22% of them were found to be communicatively using AA, while 69.78% of the items in the module were found to be using traditional assessment (TA). Secondly, the instructors’ assessment practices in CESC were inconsistent with AA, and varied across the three universities and from instructor to instructor. The assessment items were disproportionate to the language objectives in CESC because the instructors mainly devoted more time to assessing reading skills, grammar, and vocabulary knowledge. For example, the correlation coefficients of the assessment items for grammar (0.142), vocabulary (0.139), and reading (0.115) were better aligned with the content items in the CESC module than the assessment