Reading Assessment Awareness: A Comparative Analysis of Public and Private School ESL Teachers in Pakistan

Assessment literacy is of key importance to ensure quality education and meaningful learning process. Teaching is a conscious and clever business and the teachers who know what they are doing and why they are doing it are arguably better than those who know not. This quantitative study investigates the reading assessment awareness level of public and private ESL school teachers in Pakistan and the differences between the awareness levels of the two. For this purpose, the valid and reliable Language Assessment Knowledge Scale (henceforth LAKS) (Ozturk and Aydin, 2019) was adapted and run on 62 public and private ESL teachers using MS Forms. A descriptive and statistical analysis was run to measure the knowledge and differences between the awareness levels of public and private ESL teachers. The results of this study showed that the overall awareness level of public and private teachers was satisfactory; however, the private teachers were found to have a better awareness level about reading assessment. The findings of this study may be useful for teachers to re-evaluate their perceptions of themselves in terms of reading assessment competence to improve their classroom practices.