One aim of this paper is to examine pre-service language teachers' perspectives on what they want to know, to scrutinize how they may reason and how they perceive summative assessment. Another aim is to show what regulatory frameworks stipulate and what research shows with regard to assessment literacy and cognitive approaches to learning. 

Results from interviews (n=25) and surveys (n=90) showed that a majority of the students thought that they could define assessment terminology. One recurring feature, however, was that the respondents in the interviews needed to be reminded about the theoretical definition of terms. Nevertheless, it became obvious that they knew and could describe the practical implications of terminology in follow-up questions. An analysis of these and further aspects of our study will be introduced in light of constructivist grounded theory.