DISCURSIVELY CONSTRUCTING TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF EFL ASSESSMENT POLICIES AND TEACHER AGENCY

Abstract

In accountability-driven educational systems, assessment policies play a central role in regulating English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ professional practices and institutional responsibilities. Although applied linguistics research has widely addressed assessment practices and their pedagogical effects, there remains a lack of critical inquiry into how assessment policies linguistically construct teacher accountability and shape professional agency. This qualitative study addresses this gap by employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to investigate the discursive representation of EFL teachers in assessment policy documents and teachers’ interpretations of these representations. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework, the study analyzes a corpus of national and institutional EFL assessment policy texts alongside semi-structured interviews with 8–12 EFL teachers from secondary and higher education contexts. The analysis examines textual features such as modality, evaluative language, and nominalization to uncover implicit power relations embedded in policy discourse. Teachers’ narratives are analyzed to explore how these discourses are appropriated, negotiated, or resisted in classroom assessment practices. At the level of social practice, the study situates these discursive processes within broader accountability regimes in contemporary EFL education. The study is expected to demonstrate that assessment policies predominantly construct teachers as responsible for measurable outcomes, often limiting pedagogical autonomy, while teachers actively negotiate these discourses to maintain professional agency. The findings contribute to applied linguistics by highlighting the role of discourse in shaping assessment-related teacher identities and by offering implications for more equitable and context-sensitive assessment policy development.