Unveiling Needs for Grammatical Competence Assessment in a CEFR-Based Curriculum: Empowering Student Involvement in Assessment for Learning in Thailand
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Abstract
This study investigated university freshmen’s needs and expectations regarding the assessment of grammatical competence (GC) for communicative use within the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)-aligned communicative language teaching (CLT) and assessment for learning (AfL) frameworks using a mixed methods needs analysis design. Data were collected from 950 first-year students enrolled in a recently implemented CEFR-based compulsory general education curriculum at a leading public university in Bangkok, Thailand. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, directional Likert-scale analysis, Friedman tests, correlational analyses, and thematic analysis of interview data. The findings indicated that students had moderate confidence in their GC and perceived it as a relative weakness that hindered their confidence in communication. Correlational analysis revealed a strong positive relationship between GC and overall communicative competence, underscoring the central role of GC in supporting communication within a CLT framework. Grammar-domain analysis further revealed uneven confidence across GC domains, with particularly low confidence in discourse-dependent structures (e.g., complex sentence relations and cohesive devices) compared with sentence-level forms (e.g., tense and aspect, subject–verb agreement, and basic clause structures). Students also expressed strong learning-oriented expectations for GC assessment. These findings reveal a gap in CLT implementation and provide diagnostic evidence to inform the development of AfL-oriented GC assessment in Thailand’s English as a foreign language (EFL) context.
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