AN EVALUATION OF CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENTS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE AT TERTIARY LEVEL IN KHULNA CITY

Tests play a significant role in any educational procedure or progression. These help the teachers or instructors determine the range in which educational purposes are being attained. At the tertiary level institutions of Bangladesh, the syllabi of English for both under-graduate and masters’ level are designed with ample numbers of literary texts. However, English language and literature share an inseparable and intensive relation. Literature relies on language as it is a vital instrument for the purpose of communication. Therefore, the questions from literary pieces are commonly designed by putting more emphasis on philosophical and thematic aspects for the fulfilment of academic goals. But students’ knowledge of grammatical ranges, sentence structures, lexical resources and linguistic aspects remain significantly weak. Hence, they possess a remarkable number of deficiencies in developing their basic language skills and often lag behind from building a strong foundation of language proficiency. This is the reason for which they run after additional courses for developing their basic skills of language, even after accomplishing the academic goals by studying in English even for couple of years. Moreover, ‘learning language through literature’ can be considered as one of the most effective ways to improve learners’ expertise level of language. In this regard, continuous assessments can function as a prime tool for measuring language proficiency. Continuous assessments can be categorized as “achievement tests”. More specifically, continuous assessments can be categorized as progress achievement tests which are designed to monitor and record students’ progress that they make. Furthermore, these types of assessments are commonly employed in every university to locate students’ level of progression during learning process. Continuous assessments can measure students’ development of knowledge in a systematic manner before any summative test. The testing measures should be assigned in such a way that can help learners develop their basic language skills. Unfortunately, the traditional style of conducting such tests cannot ensure the highest amount of mastery for the students. Therefore, both testtakers and test-givers face some deficiencies. In this regard, while using literary pieces as the prime sources for developing language efficiency level, diversity in testing methods should be bought about. Moreover, by compiling both quantitative and qualitative methods, this study aims at achieving data from the respondents of the selected universities of Khulna city. The researcher collects opinions, recommendations and problems that respondents face through the course of the testing methods by the help of questionnaire survey, interview method and focused group discussion. Furthermore, the samples of the questions and the scripts of continuous assessments from the selected universities are also collected and analysed intensively. Moreover, the data are elaborated and computed in an objective manner. 

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