There are a number of reasons or purposes for an institution to conduct assessment in various courses including second or foreign language courses. These include, for example, for reflection on its curriculum goals, for feedback on students’ performance and for improvement in their knowledge and skills. The question is whether students in this study who indicated that assessment was important or very important had similar ideas about the functions of assessment. To find out why they regard assessment as important, students were provided with an open-ended question, asking to give their reasons. Students’ answers were categorised by similar statements and are presented below under each sub-heading in order of frequency.

The reasons summarised above suggest that most students were well aware of the purpose and function of assessment in that they regarded it as part of their learning, as indications of their learning progress and as a tool to measure their knowledge of and skills in the language. For some others, assessment in language courses was perceived as a way of achieving good marks or measuring their memory skills. Interestingly, however, the number of students who perceived assessment as a way of improving their knowledge and skills, considered to be one of the key functions of assessment, were relatively low. It is not known whether students were unaware of the importance of assessment, whether such a function was really regarded as trivial or whether students’ intention of improvement was reflected in the first three answers.

Below are some of the students' comments highlighting the function of assessment to encourage students’ learning, indicate their progress and measure their knowledge and skills.2)

On the other hand, comments stating the role of obtaining (good) marks, improving their knowledge and skills, and measuring their memory skills include:

Although two of the above reasons students gave (ie. to get (good) marks and measure their memory skills) may not be desirable functions of assessment, it may be true that some students may actually regard assessment in a language course simply as a way of obtaining good marks or as a matter of how well they memorise what they learnt. Including the function of assessment for improvement, which was not much mentioned, the three categories offer some points to consider how assessment strategies can be improved and how students can be better informed of the function of assessment.

Students need guidance from teachers in learning any subject matter including second or foreign languages, and teacher feedback associated with particular assessment components plays a role in indicating what students need to improve and how, as well as what is important in their performance. It is assumed that students may find feedback important. To find out what importance is ascribed to teacher feedback, students were asked to indicate how important teacher feedback is by using the five-point scale. The result is shown in Table 2 below.

Teacher feedback typically helps students identify their strengths and weaknesses, to assist in improving their knowledge and skills and learn from their errors. Students in this present study gave a strong support for feedback and it is useful to be informed of their reasons. To find out why they see feedback important, students were provided with an open-ended question, asking to write their reasons. Four groups of reasons have emerged from the analysis. Students’ answers were categorised and are set out below under each sub-heading.

Nearly half of the students (46.5%) responded that feedback is important because it helps them learn from their errors to improve their knowledge of and skills in the language (ie. Korean). From the responses it is clear that students regard teacher feedback as an indispensable tool that they use in order to learn and improve more. For others, feedback was a way of ensuring that what they say and write is correct and appropriate. It is for checking the certainty of whether they correctly apply what they have learnt. Still for some others, feedback was served to point out what their errors are or to indicate how well they had progressed. Some of the students’ reasons stating improvement, certainty, progress and error-pointer are presented below.3)

“Because it will help us to improve more and to learn from mistakes.”

The above statements suggest that while students have a strong tendency to see teacher feedback as a tool to improve on aspects or elements of weaknesses and learn more, they also use the opportunity for practical purposes – having teachers check their language use, point out errors and tell about their progress. This is encouraging in that students see the value of feedback from both broad and specific perspectives, which all come down to efforts to learn more and better. One particular point worth noting here is that when asked about the reasons why assessment is important, their answers were more along the lines of stimulating to study and indicating their progress, whereas when asked about the reasons why feedback was important, their answers were significantly more of helping them improve by learning from errors. These views on assessment and feedback are fair enough in that they reflect some key functions of assessment and feedback, respectively. We now turn to another topic – assessment categories below.

There are various types of assessment ranging from simple quizzes to long essays or portfolio projects. The present study is not intended to deal with these specific types of assessment as institutions use all different types of assessment that suit their curriculum goals and hence discussions of some particular types of assessment may be irrelevant. Instead, the study is interested in the categories or elements or aspects to be assessed in L2 courses, as they broadly cover any language assessment. Conventional language assessment includes various tasks measuring students’ skills (eg. speaking or writing skills) and their knowledge (eg. grammatical or cultural knowledge). The question here is what categories or aspects should be included in a L2 assessment. To understand this more deeply, students were asked to choose categories out of five options. They were allowed to choose more than one and were also given an open-ended option in which they could offer an alternative. Table 3 shows the results.

The key findings in this survey study can be summarised as follows:

In short, the findings show that students in this study are very positive about assessment, motivational about the teacher feedback, and very practical about what to assess. They regard assessment very important because it encourages, indicates and measures their language learning. They value teacher feedback very highly because it helps them improve and functions as a practical tool for their on-going learning strategies. In terms of assessment elements, they place a higher priority on practical skills with more emphasis on spoken language skills than any other aspects of language learning. These findings of positive and encouraging attitude offer a number of points for discussion in relation with their implications in planning and implementing assessment strategies in Korean as a foreign or second language programs.

First, it is possible and even desirable for the program authority to review the curriculum and consider the active function of assessment where it contributes to students’ learning of Korean and of improving their knowledge and skills. In a conventional curriculum, the primary function of assessment, in many cases, is to provide students with diagnostic feedback on their performance in assessment tasks and accordingly marks and grades. It functions as a passive, teacher-centred process in which assessment is a by-product, or outcome of learning rather than an integral component of teaching and learning.

The findings of this study clearly indicate that students regard assessment more than just a tool to assess learning and provide the teacher with assessment results. Students see assessment itself as an important opportunity for them to learn and improve their knowledge/skills beyond conventional perceptions. In this regard, the idea of ‘assessment for learning’ proposed by Chappuis and Stiggins (2002) is relevant. They suggest that “classroom assessments that involve students in the assessment process can improve learning” and explain that in assessment for learning “both teacher and student use classroom assessment information to modify teaching and learning activities.” (p. 40). Thus students are part of the assessment process and may be asked to help design tests or rubrics for scoring. Implementing such active function of assessment can help build students’ awareness of their progress in learning, evaluate their strengths and areas of further improvement and give their peers suggestions. Whether it is applicable or adoptable to KFL programs still needs to be examined against a number of factors such as flexibility of the language curriculum of a particular institution. Where possible, however, especially if students are positive about assessment as indicated in this study, it may be worthwhile to explore ways to design curriculum where students are not passive in the assessment process but are engaged in developing the assessment, determining what a good performance entails.

Secondly, it may also be desirable to explore some new ways of assessing students such as performance and ‘personal-response’ assessments (Brown and Hudson, 1998). Students in this study prefer to place a high priority on the practical use of their language skills in language assessment and as pointed out by studies such as Ingram (2005) there is always a gap between language assessment and real-life language experience. One way to respond to the need and resolve the problem is to design assessment that focuses on the whole language or real language performance rather than elements within the language. In this regard, performance assessments are relevant and useful as they require students to complete ‘real-life’ and authentic tasks, often using the productive skills of speaking or writing. Examples of performance assessments include interviews, problem-solving tasks, pair-work tasks, role-plays and group discussions. Such assessments are advantageous in that they can “come close to authentic communication” and “provide more valid measures of students’ abilities to respond to real-life language tasks” (Brown and Hudson 1998: 662). How adoptable or applicable performance assessments are in KFL programs depends on a number of practical elements. In addition to extra time and efforts to produce and administer performance assessments, there are other elements for the program authority to consider, such as costs that may be incurred in developing and administering performance assessments, special equipment for audio- or videotapes to collect and subjectivity in the scoring process. Thus most of the performance assessments will require careful planning and responsible executive decisions at the managerial level.

Personal-response assessments are another category worth noting in relation with the results of this study and to promote active learning through assessments. Personal-response assessments such as conferences, portfolios and self-and peer assessment are advantageous in that they provide personal or individualised assessment in an ongoing manner throughout the term or semester. While the program authority may wish to explore conference assessments (involving individual consultations with students focused on learning processes and strategies used in, for example, a particular project work) and self-assessments (involving students’ self-rating of their own L2 language ability through performance, comprehension or observation), the discussion here is focused on electronic portfolio assessments which are getting attention in this digital era (Cummins and Davesne, 2009).

A portfolio has been used by photographers, models, graphic artists, and practitioners of similar vocations for decades to show their work and skills in a compact and convenient form such as folders, CDs, USB and other devices. In recent years portfolios have also been utilised in language education. Language teachers use portfolios to encourage their students to compile and display their work and thus in portfolio assessments, language students are asked to collect, select, describe, analyse and evaluate evidence to demonstrate how well they have achieved their objectives. Their work is usually assessed based on a description, presentation and analysis of their achievements, skills, efforts, abilities and contributions to a particular class. Portfolio assessments are advantageous in that they can strengthen students’ learning as reported in Cummins and Davesne (2009) and make students engage in ongoing reflection on what they accomplished and how they would develop future projects. What is more relevant is that electronic (or e-) portfolios have enormous advantages compared with paper-portfolios in that they are capable of storing a wide variety of media files and easy to organise or re-organise and also easy to interact internally (eg. checking the student’s progress towards goals) and externally (eg. feedback from the teacher). Though there are some disadvantages of using portfolio assessments in the “the issues of design decisions, logistics, interpretations, reliability and validity” (Brown and Hudson 1998: 665), merits seem to outweigh disadvantages. There is an identified need to utilise portfolios more than in the past and in this ever-evolving digital era it seems sensible to explore ways of utilising e-portfolio assessments which can accommodate the learner-centred curriculum and learner autonomy as well as skills making use of educational technology.

Another aspect that the findings imply relates to teacher feedback, which is highly valued in this study. The findings reinforce that if assessment should function as a process of students’ active learning, teacher feedback is a critical part of students’ L2 learning and that it should be effective and clear to maximise students’ learning. Teachers are responsible for modelling what is important in terms of learning and assessment of performance. In that regard, teacher feedback should work as a means to support students’ learning and engage them with their learning, thereby improving their performance. From a technical perspective, the question such as whether or not corrective feedback is more effective when it is targeted to particular errors, whether implicit feedback or explicit feedback should be given or whether the feedback should be focused more on fluency than accuracy is another area of research, as suggested by Russell and Spada (2006). What is important here is that students need guidance and that they need clear, descriptive and well-illustrated feedback to encourage active learning which will be beneficial for the improvement of their knowledge and skills. In many language courses, however, assessment and its associated feedback usually remains at the level of providing students with their achievement simply in the form of marks and grades. KFL courses are no exception and this is particularly the case in a large course. It also highlights that in many ways students learn from their mistakes and teacher feedback should work to improve the weaknesses of students so that they do not continuously produce erroneous items which can become ‘fossilised’ unless an appropriate corrective or remedial action is taken (Shin, 2013).

Last but not least, the findings suggest that students of Korean place a higher priority on their ability to use the language in assessment than any other elements of language learning, and this means that a high priority should be given to the development and practical use of communicative skills in the curriculum. What usually appears to be happening, however, is that communicative goals and skills are highlighted in the curriculum but they are not adequately translated to assessments. It is important to set practical educational goals and settings but more important for these to be reflected in assessment practices so that practical skills involving language usage can be developed.

This study has limitations but permits generalisations. The limitations mainly come from the facts that the data was collected from one particular institution and that the survey questionnaire was constructed with questions of a simplistic nature. Nevertheless, the study has provided some valuable insights into students’ perceptions of assessments, teacher feedback and areas to be assessed in a language course. From the findings it can be concluded that students of Korean who participated in this study value teacher feedback very highly and have a very positive attitude towards assessment that was perceived to be a part of their learning process. They also have a clear desire to have their practical skills assessed as a priority. It is suggested, therefore, that teacher feedback should be provided to students clearly and efficiently and in a way that helps improve student learning. It is also suggested that new assessment strategies should be explored to accommodate active learning, reflect practical skills and utilise digital technology where appropriate. Future research could be focused on effects of these new attempts on KFL learning and assessments.