AN INVESTIGATION OF SECONDARY SCHOOL ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS‟ AWARENESS, PRACTICE AND CHALLENGES ON CONTINUOUS WRITINGASSESSMENT: THE CASES WOLKITE HIDESE FIREW SECONDARY AND PREPARATORY SCHOO

Abstract

Teacher’s awareness means teacher understands and believes to ass students. Writing is an interactive cognitive process which is based on the ability to create words and ideas. The purpose of this research was to investigate English language teachers‟ practice and challenges of continuous assessment (CA) in writing classes. To attain this objective, a descriptive survey research method was employed.. The sample consisted ten English language teachers who thought students from grade 9 to 12 and, 46students who had drawn from 2949 students of the schools. Simple random sampling technique was used to select the target schools while purposive sampling techniques was employed to select the participants of teachers and stratified simple random sampling technique used to select participant of students. To gather the necessary data, questionnaire, interviews, and observations were employed. In analyzing the data, percentage and mean were used. The results of the study showed that teachers‟ perceptive of the principles and purposes of CA were inadequate. Besides, there was a gap in the implementation ofCA in their writing classes. From the results of the study, teachers didn‟t give immediate feedback for their students. Even though there are various assessment devices in assessing writing skills, a few of them were only implemented in the writing classes, namely tests, quizzes and group assignment. Furthermore, the finding of the study indicated that large class size and high workloads were identified as the main factors of the implementation of CA in their writing classes. Thus, based on the findings of the study, the following recommendations were forwarded to alleviate the abovementioned problems in the schools. Any stakeholder should give successive training for teacher on how to give writing assessment and how to give immediate feedback for student's .And other stakeholder should fulfill necessary materials, which help for the teachers, like text book, building additional classroom for students.