Resources

How to Use the Book

Testing and assessment is part of modern life. School children around the world are constantly assessed, whether to monitor their educational progress, or for governments to evaluate the quality of school systems. Adults are tested to see if they are suitable for a job they have applied for, or if they have the skills necessary for promotion. Entrance to educational establishments, to professions, and even to entire countries, is sometimes controlled by tests. Tests play a fundamental and controversial role in allowing access to the limited resources and opportunities that our world provides. The importance of understanding what we test, how we test, and the impact that the use of tests has on individuals and societies cannot be understated. Testing is more than a technical activity; it is also an ethical enterprise.

The practice of language testing draws upon, and also contributes to, all disciplines within applied linguistics. However, there is something fundamentally different about language testing. Language testing is all about building better tests, researching how to build better tests, and in so doing, understanding better the things that we test.

Sociolinguists do not create ‘sociolinguistic things’. Discourse analysts do not create ‘discourses’. Phonologists do not create spoken utterances. Language testing, in contrast, is about doing. It is about creating tests.

In a sense, therefore, each section of this book is about the practical aspects of doing and of creating. And so each section has a research implication; no section is concerned purely with exposition. Research ideas may be made explicit in C: Exploration, but they are implicit throughout the book; put another way, the creative drive of language testing makes it a research enterprise, we think, at all times.

In the text we do not merely reflect the state of the art in language testing and assessment; nor do we simply introduce existing research. Our discussion is set within a new approach that we believe brings together testing practice, theory, ethics and philosophy. At the heart of our new approach is the concept of effect driven testing. This is a view of test validity that is highly pragmatic. Our emphasis is on the outcome of testing activities. Our concern with test effect informs the order and structure of chapters, and it defines our approach to test design and development.

As test design and development is about doing, creating and researching, we have taken special care over the activities. With Dewey, we believe that through doing we grow as language testers, as applied linguists, and as language teachers.

The book is divided into three sections. A: Introduction consists of 10 Units dealing with the central concepts of Language Testing and Assessment. It contains activities for you to carry out alone or with others if you are studying this book as part of a course. B: Extension provides extracts from articles or books relating to Language Testing and Assessment which give you further insights into the concepts introduced in Section A. Each extract in B: Extension is accompanied by activities to focus your reading and help you to evaluate critically what you have read and understand how it links to a wider discussion of language testing and assessment. C: Exploration builds on the material you will already have found in the book. In this section we provide extended activities that help you to work through practical and theoretical problems that have been posed in the other sections. We also present ideas for individual and group project work, as well as suggestions for research projects.

The organisation of this book means that you can concentrate on particular themes such as Classroom Assessment, or Writing Items and Tasks by reading the relevant units from A: Introduction, B: Extension and C: Exploration consecutively. Alternatively, you may wish to read the whole of A: Introduction before embarking on Sections B and C. In fact, you may decide to read the Sections in any sequence, just as you would read Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch: there is no one right place to start, and each path through the text provides a different experience. Whichever choice you make, the book is extensively cross-referenced and carefully indexed so that you can easily find your way around the material.

At the end of the book we provide a glossary of key terms that are not explained within the text itself. If you come across a term about which you feel uncertain, simply turn to the glossary for an explanation. We also provide an extensive list of references for additional reading.