Teachers’ Employment for Student-Centered Pedagogy and Assessment Practices in the EFL Classroom from Students’ Perspective

Abstract

Pedagogy and assessment practices have always been the two pertinent domains of the EFL world, and there is a voice, which supports swapping the attention from teacher-centered to student-centered. Studies are available to research the two practices separately but researching them, with the view that they complement each other, as an integrated approach seems to be very limited, especially in Najran University context. Therefore, this study aims to explore learners’ perceptions of teachers’ employment for the practices focused on student-centered pedagogy and assessment in the EFL classroom. In addition, it correlates the participants’ responses with their gender and specialization. The survey-descriptive approach was used to achieve the study objectives. The study tools, a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were applied to a stratified sample of 200 participants. The results show that the study sample medially perceived the teacher’s employment of pedagogy practices focused on students. The assessment practices focused on students were highly perceived by the respondents. Moreover, the variables of gender and specialization did not have any influence on the respondents’ answers to the questionnaire. Finally, the content analysis of the semi-structured interview reveals that the majority of the interviewees approved that student-centered pedagogy and assessment practices play a positive role in improving their classroom efficacy. In light of the current results, recommendations and implications are suggested.