This chapter charts the wash-forwards gained by the teacher authors who learnt through assessment in the process of teaching an online English language proficiency course that was offered to adult students in mainstream higher education classrooms. The whole course used scenario-based learning and assessment as its tapestry. Students were treated as equal partners; the learnings and the feed-forwards for further courses for the author-teachers were in the areas of time management; new group dynamics, the use of new technological tools as taught by students, the varied uses of plurilingual language use, and new ways of raising an awareness of the potentiality of language to be used in a constructive, neutral, or destructive manner. The students also benefited because they learnt to reflect on their own academic lives, to take responsibility for their academic decisions, and to be aware of their own language use. Though the primary context was the online teaching context during Covid-19, the implications are for regular offline and post-Covid classrooms.
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This chapter is a self-reflective (Roy & Uekusa, 2020) narrative that relies on “mining our own lives, our own experiences” (Rothman, 2007, p. 12) as we turn our everyday teaching experiences into research data and use them as topics of analysis (Francis & Hester, 2012; Rothman, 2007). This includes the strategies used by the two teacher authors to keep the students cognitively engaged during an adult mainstream (not distance mode), online undergraduate-level proficiency course in English. The deliberate focus is on how we (both teachers and students) learnt through the varied strategic assessment practices that were intricately woven into the course. These include the modified use of scenario-based assessment (Purpura, 2021) for formative evaluation, the use of Parkinson's Law (Gutierrez & Kouvelis, 1991; Olleras et al., 2022; Parkinson, 1957) as a means to tap and enable higher-order language skills, modifications in the nature and type of group work done in class, the use of other languages in the English classroom as an asset, and the need to go beyond proficiency to raise awareness of how language has the potential to be used constructively, neutrally or destructively by all human beings.
The chapter focuses on teacher learnings primarily, but where evidence is available, also touches on students' learnings. These learnings (both by teachers and students) are reflective and post-experiential; rooted in grounded theory (Cresswell, 2002; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) they are an encapsulation of theorization from practice and structured in such a way that a separate literature review section is not feasible. Detailed theoretical postulations and critiques are therefore presented along with the discussion of the teachers’ learning outcomes. This integration is due to the novel nature of the topic and the analytically unique treatment of the area that is exploratory in its direction, and implicatory in its conclusion based as it is in situational analysis (Clarke, 2007). Some terms that have been dormant in the literature are discussed as terminological clarifications for ease of comprehension, along with some of the major perspectival arguments that informed and shaped the course, assuming common knowledge of terms used in testing as a discipline. Some terms that are section specific are elaborated upon in the relevant sections. A brief discussion on the background to the main timeline, that is COVID-19, is also presented to situate the study and foreground the context adequately. The major areas of learning include discussions on time-management issues, the equal partnership of teachers and students in learning, group dynamics, the use of technological tools in real-time, the plurilingual reality of the Indian subcontinent, its implications in the classroom and language potentiality; these are elaborated to lead to a logical conclusion.
A few new terms that are used throughout the chapter, or that need clarification can be presented here initially and discussed in detail later where required to enhance the discussion: this revisiting is not a redundancy but is primarily for emphasis. The term ‘anthrogogy’ (Deepa, n.d., 2022a, 2022b, 2022c, 2022d; Trott, 1991) is one of the newest terms re-entering the realm of education; in this context, it is applied to mainstream higher education classrooms such as undergraduate classrooms in India where the students are 18+years of biological age and have registered for a degree in regular classrooms and not through the distance mode. The term though it has origins in ‘andragogy’ (Knowles, 1968) is not used in that sense but as a separate approach to language testing in this chapter. Anthrogogy “refers to teaching adults (all genders) and has its own set of principles of teaching and testing where the emphasis is on living a life of a cohabitant alongside other beings peacefully on planet earth.” (Deepa, 2022c, p.165).