Constructing Sustainability or Let Them Do It: Alternative Social Assessment in Adult EFL Context

Abstract

This research shores the view of a learner’s subjective and self-reflective role in tile assessment process. Breaking the passive role-playing ground of attempting a test, a test taker as a conscious social independent identify can make a decisive contribution to tile existing evaluation process. Through active participation, and presentation as a positive social impact maker in dealing with various social issues outside the classroom under the umbrella of social assessment, a learner can assess himself or herself. This facilitates one to assess his or her roles in tile existing practices of different modes of formal classroom assessments to make a fresh start to meet the current discontents in the graduates’ employment scenario. Time unemployment rate among university graduates is higher than other times (FE 2020; Bangladesh Employment and labor Market Watch 2018). Apart from pandemic effects and other reasons, this fall alarmingly points to the quality of hillier education, to the most extent at the validity and reliability of the assessment process these graduates have already undergone in their hillier studies. Added with this, the preference of employability skills valued by the employment stakeholders, from hard to soft and social skills (57%) has linen the unemployment problem a new dimension. It gives the impression that the purpose of higher education is not just to produce only but also to create graduates with portable skills and knowledge for successful future employability. A number of studies have addressed quality issues in Hillier education but not many in the country’s Graduate attributes and assessment practices and policies. Therefore, this area needs thoughtful attention to review the existing studies and the strong emphasis on such Gaps. Along with formative/summative classroom assessments, sets of rubrics, and issues of test reliability, it is very important to address tile test taker (learner) in tile social context to address the current employment standards for acquiring both soft and hard skills. In this regard, social assessment within the context of English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) teaching and learning can allow one to gather data 0n ‘21st-century skills’ of the learner, including intra/self-management and interpersonal/people skills. This paper recommends the incorporation of the graduates’ attributes and involvement along with the teachers’ in the tile learning and assessment process. Also, this claims for a paradigm shift in the current assessment practices at higher studies in Bangladesh by incorporating sustainable social assessment principles.