State of the Art in Language Testing: Ten Years of History or How to Deal with Assessment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199711288Abstract
A follow-up of the ten-year Language Testing (LT) history is canied out in this study. Our aim is to give a broad idea of what has been done in this Journal and whether or not it has been the forum for the assessment of language ability it intended to be over this period. Firstly we take the 1984 issues as a key moment in the ten-year history of LT, since they provide the route map to be followed and developed in subsequent issues. Then, attention is paid to the articles on Item Response Theory (IRT), a thread that runs through this whole journal, and to the research on TOEFL, which is seen as a second thread running through the texture of LT. Finally, contributions on authenticity, self-assessment, extralinguistic factors and testing techniques are considered. On the whole, it can be concluded that the range of topics discussed over these ten years make up the real state of the art in language testing.
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