The significance of teacher understanding of formative assessment for effective English writing teaching in Azerbaijan as a developing country: the case of IELTS academic writing task 2

This article is devoted to studying teacher literacy of IELTS writing Task 2 assessment in Azerbaijan as a developing country. The problem regarding lack of teacher literacy in this area as well as reasons lying behind it were discussed to achieve an expedient conclusion. The article also describes further plans in regard to possible solutions to this problem. Writing is a very challenging module for IELTS teachers in Azerbaijan regarding the implementation of right tools while evaluating. We are convinced of this because of our awareness of students’ unfavorable writing Task 2 results in Azerbaijan. Considering the fact that ongoing assessment is an inseparable part of teaching, it appears reasonable that it is teacher’s literacy level of assessment, as one of the greatly influential factors, that lies at the root of students’ adverse writing test results. The reason that makes us to focus on teacher assessment literacy in regard to this issue is that both need for teaching to IELTS test as well as integration of assessment methods into teaching process are new tendencies in Azerbaijan which require some more time and efforts from teachers to adapt. So teacher literacy of IELTS writing Task 2 assessment is generally the main idea of this article.