ABSTRACT
Educating teachers to assess learning at primary, secondary and tertiary levels and for lifelong studies should be a top priority for postgraduate courses or teacher-training programmes to ensure the validity, reliability, fairness and usefulness of assessments. The reality, however, is that Chinese as a foreign/second language (CFL) teachers have been in the same predicament as teachers of other languages, learning the ‘trade’ of assessment on the job through trial and error from their mentors or by following the established institutional practice. Many CFL practitioners are often at loss to deal with the business of assessment on the courses they teach with mentors who are neither provided with adequate training on assessment. CFL classroom teachers must have the competence to guide their students in exploring the learning journey and succeeding in the process. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
