Abstract
During recent years, autonomy in our endeavours has been increased specifically in our learning activities such as self-scoring, self-reflecting, etc. In particular, self-assessment as part of language learning in the context of educational research has been widely investigated (e.g.
Boud, D., 1995, Taras, M., 2010, Davis, J. M. et al.,2018).
However, there is no recent comprehensive literature review about self-assessment in learning foreign languages since 1988 which was carried out by Blanche (1988). In his literature review the concept of self-assessment was used in different modes of evaluation.
This study aims to review the literature focusing on how the self-assessment in the context of English language teaching and learning as a foreign language has been used from 1980 to the present time. The literature published from 1980 to 2018 was searched through within three data bases (Web of Science, Scopus and ERIC). 753 papers were selected and more papers were eliminated due to the lack of direct relevance to language learning and self-assessment as well as redundant titles (overlapping in two or three databases) resulting in about 480 papers.
The remaining papers were categorised in three categories of their focus on English learning, other foreign language learning and self-assessment. The emerging themes such as self-assessment as a formative assessment, self-assessment as self-rating and self-assessment as self-reflection / self-observation will be introduced as a result of this investigation.