Useful Assessment and Evaluation in Language Education

In 2016, the annual spring conference sponsored by the Georgetown University linguistics department was organized by a body researching language assessment and language program evaluation. The 14 selected papers cover connecting assessment; learners, and learning; innovating, framing, and exploring assessment in language education; and validity evaluation. The topics include the role of the teacher in developing students' self-assessment skills, linguistic correlates of proficiency: at the intersection of testing and teaching, face-to-face speaking assessment in the digital age: interactive speaking tools online, using a validation framework as a guide for planning analyses and collecting information in operational or pre-operational testing, and validating assessments for meaning and usefulness. Annotation ©2018 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

John McE. Davis is Evaluation Specialist at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State (Contractor with Yorktown Systems Group). His research interests include language program evaluation, language assessment, and questionnaire research methods.

John M. Norris is Senior Research Director of the Center for English Language Learning and Assessment at the Educational Testing Service, USA. His primary research interests include educational uses of language assessment, program evaluation, task-based language teaching, and research synthesis.


Margaret E. Malone is Director of the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC) and Research Professor at Georgetown University and Director of the Center for Assessment, Research and Development at ACTFL. Her current research focuses on language assessment literacy, oral proficiency assessment and the relative difficulty of learning different languages.

Todd H. McKay is a Ph.D. candidate in applied linguistics and research assistant with the AELRC at Georgetown University. His research interests include language assessment, language program evaluation, and applied measurement, with emphases on the less commonly taught languages and language programs in South Asia.

Young-A Son is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research interests include the assessment of foreign and heritage language learners. More specifically, her work examines validation of language tests and other indicators of language proficiency for research as well as instructional purposes.