Optimizing Teacher-Student Collaborative Assessment in the Production-Oriented Approach: A Dialectical Research

Teacher-student collaborative assessment (TSCA) aims to address the challenges of responding to students’ work in the Production-Oriented Approach: low efficiency and poor effectiveness. As part of a bigger project carried out in a Chinese university over a period of three years, the present study explored how the teacher prepared and implemented TSCA in class, especially with a focus on how she determined the assessing objective and worked collaboratively with her students in class to achieve it, using the students’ written and translated texts as examples. By adopting the dialectical research (DR) method, this paper collected qualitative data such as teaching plans, classroom recordings, and reflective journals of the teacher-researcher (the author), along with students’ written drafts and translated texts. TSCA theory and classroom practice have been refined simultaneously by means of putting theory into practice and reflecting upon it. The optimized pre-class and in-class procedures may shed some light on applying TSCA to L2 classrooms.