ABSTRACT
Assessment, which is potentially one of the most interesting and important aspects of teaching and learning, is often seen by beginning teachers as a necessary but rather tedious chore; this tends to be even truer in the context of English than in other subjects. Evidence from Ofsted inspections judges this to be the weakest aspect of teachers’ work; the Teacher Training Agency’s survey of newly qualified teachers identified assessment as the area for which many of them felt least well prepared. Most books on the teaching of English published in the last 15 years either neglect assessment entirely or tend to reiterate some of the standard jargon and received opinions on the subject. Few of the publications engage with some of the more pressing issues pertaining to assessment: that it is potentially damaging, full of tensions and sometimes difficult to reconcile with an arts-based approach to English teaching.
