CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF EVALUATION METHODS IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Investigating the nature of language according to the definition of Bakhtin (1986) reveals that language as the “hero” in discourse of events in considered to be social and context-based. Related to the contextualized view of language, evaluating the students language becomes significant locus. On one side, the dynamic nature of language causes every word to have a history and traces of its previous user (heteroglossia). On the other hand, student’s language is assessed by a single school bound test which normally stripes language of its social-historical features. Encountering this new definition of language along with the evaluation methods in Iranian school raised questioned in my mind made me conscious of my constant worries in teaching. In this paper, I aim to see language learning process by children in a context where they do not take the usual exams and the school relationship with these children regarding judgment and evaluation. I also examine that how school authorities present their position toward the non-standard-evaluation method of English teachers. I described the school grading system and the changes they have undergone in new evaluation methods. This paper also has a special focus on judgmental or evaluative behavior of children. This study is a critical ethnography and the data for this analysis is collected over one academic year in a primary school with 60 school boys. I will demonstrate that unlike the school early claim in changing the evaluation methods, things were changing in surface and the teachers as well as parents were still using “grading system”.