This second edition remains the most practical guide to testing language. It has a new chapter on testing young learners.

This second edition remains the most practical guide to testing language. It has a new chapter on testing young learners.

This Element reviews the key foundational concepts, beliefs, and practices underpinning approaches to assessment in English Language Teaching. Exploring major concepts and practices through educational, social, and ethical perspectives, it offers theoretically informed and close-to-practice descriptions and up-to-date explanations of the affordances and limitations of different assessment approaches related to language teaching. This Element presents a cohesive and pragmatic framework that allows teachers to efficiently implement tests and assessments in their contexts.

This book focuses where assessment has greatest relevance—the classroom. A great deal of research related to assessment is focused on ‘the testing industry’, high-stakes language proficiency testing, and related analytical and statistical reports that are far removed from teachers’ and students’ experiences in the classroom. Recently, more attention has been paid to assessment in language classrooms and the many challenges that teachers face in both measuring and promoting student learning. This book contributes to the body of knowledge related to teacher assessment competence, and how it is manifested in the decisions they make about assessment procedures and instruments in their classes. Focused on specific challenges related to classroom assessment, each chapter reports on particular assessment issues faced by teachers, their choices regarding such issues, and the consequences (actual or anticipated) of their decision-making. This book will interest the thousands of teachers globally dealing with the numerous challenges associated with effective classroom assessment in language learning. This collection of teacher voices, stories, and investigations provides possible solutions to such challenges, and will serve to promote assessment literacy in the language teaching profession.

Classroom tests are an everyday feature of second and foreign language classrooms worldwide. Teachers spend a lot of time and energy making and using tests, and learners spend of lot of time and energy taking them. Nonetheless, such assessments are under-studied, as they are considered routine. This volume illuminates this little-researched area. Featuring fifteen classroom language tests made and used by Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish teachers, the book includes parallel teacher commentary and testing content chapters that transparently probe the teachers’ processes of making and using their tests. Rather than view teachers’ tests as poor shadows of what professional test writers do, this work identifies the reasoning behind teachers’ tests. In addition, focused testing content chapters take examples directly from the actual tests and the accompanying teacher commentary. This book is an accessible, applied resource for second and foreign language teachers, language program administrators working with teachers, students in teacher preparation and enrichment programs, and scholars in language teaching, learning, and testing.

This book provides interdisciplinary perspectives on task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-based language assessment (TBLA) in English as a second language (ESL) context. It discusses theoretical and experimental insights of TBLT and TBLA from cognitive, cognitive linguistic, and psycholinguistic viewpoints. The chapters, written by leading language teaching specialists in the field, introduce the reader to a comprehensive range of issues related to TBLT and TBLA such as curriculum design, materials development, and classroom teaching & testing. With interdisciplinary appeal, the book is a valuable resource for researchers in task-based language teaching and assessment. It is equally useful for teachers to whom it offers practical suggestions for designing tasks for teaching and testing.

This two volume handbook provides a comprehensive examination of policy, practice, research and theory related to English Language Teaching in international contexts. More than 70 chapters highlight the research foundation for best practices, frameworks for policy decisions, and areas of consensus and controversy in second language acquisition and pedagogy. The Handbook provides a unique resource for policy makers, educational administrators, and researchers concerned with meeting the increasing demand for effective English language teaching. It offers a strongly socio-cultural view of language learning and teaching. It is comprehensive and global in perspective with a range of fresh new voices in English language teaching research.

Pedagogical Reflections on Learning Languages in Instructed Settings is intended to provide the latest pedagogical reflections that derive from research in a variety of key areas within the discipline of language learning. Thus, this volume aims at helping practising language teachers to update their teaching methodology.The book has fifteen chapters that are grouped around five sections. The first section of the book includes three chapters, which outline past approaches to language learning and highlight advances in our understanding of how languages are likely to be learned and taught. These three chapters provide the theoretical grounding for the rest of the volume by discussing outstanding concepts in the language learning field, namely: those of eclecticism (Chapter 1), communication (Chapter 2), and learner autonomy (Chapter 3). The second section of the book contains three chapters, which explore new directions in the field that have recently caught the attention of language researchers and practitioners, namely: the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in language learning (Chapter 4) the use of language corpora (Chapter 5) and finally, the use of the portfolio as a new assessment tool responding to new pedagogical demands (Chapter 6). The third section of the book consists of three chapters, which discuss the role of learners' individual variables such as affect (Chapter 7), learning styles (Chapter 8), and learning strategies (Chapter 9), crucial for understanding the nature of language learning. The fourth section of the book has five chapters and provides insights into understanding the nature of the four language skills, that is to say, listening (Chapter 10), speaking (Chapter 11), reading (Chapter 12) and writing (Chapter 13). This section also addresses the issue of assessment with the aim of increasing awareness on the duality teaching/assessing and its pedagogical dimension (Chapter 14). The book concludes with the fifth section, which includes a single chapter, that pulls all aforementioned topics together and highlights connections to a student-centred approach, which involves a reformulation of language teachers' teaching practices (Chapter 15).

This book offers an in-depth explanation of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and the methods necessary to implement it in the language classroom successfully. Combines a survey of theory and research in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) with insights from language teaching and the philosophy of education Details best practice for TBLT programs, including discussion of learner needs and means analysis; syllabus design; materials writing; choice of methodological principles and pedagogic procedures; criterion-referenced, task-based performance assessment; and program evaluation Written by an esteemed scholar of second language acquisition with over 30 years of research and classroom experience Considers diffusion of innovation in education and the potential impact of TBLT on foreign and second language learning

This edited volume brings together 10 cutting-edge empirical studies on the realities of English language learning, teaching and testing in a wide range of global contexts where English is an additional language. It covers three themes: learners’ development of interactional competence, the organization of teaching and testing practices, and sociocultural and ideological forces that may impact classroom interaction. With a decided focus on English-as-a-Foreign-Language contexts, the studies involve varied learner populations, from children to young adults to adults, in different learning environments around the world. The insights gained will be of interest to EFL professionals, as well as teacher trainers, policymakers and researchers.