ABSTRACT
There is a plethora of publications on language assessment literacy, but very few of them provide practical guidelines for pre-service teachers’ preparation. Thus, university teachers have to develop their own teaching instruments and create corresponding activities to fit them relative to their contexts: a limited number of academic hours, a lack of teaching experience in the target group of learners, specific learning standards, etc. In-assessment checklists are used by item writers for standardizing the process of developing test tasks. This chapter will describe the potential of exploiting checklists for teaching purposes. Checklists are widely used in English Language Teaching (ELT) as a language learning and assessment tool. Normally, checklists are designed to enable teachers to collect some information about their students’ progress or needs, to identify students’ weaknesses, and to evaluate textbooks or websites. Furthermore, students rely on checklists when reflecting on their progress, namely for self and peer assessment. The advantages of checklists lie in their comparative ease of development and implementation as they can be used both with individual students and with the entire class. In consideration of the variety of functions checklists can perform, we believe they are a multifunctional tool for developing students’ assessment literacy as this process involves both learning and evaluating. This chapter will provide general principles of making checklists, outline their specific use for building assessment literacy, and offer techniques for using checklists as a remedy for a student's typical mistakes in writing items.
