Practical Language Testing

Glenn Fulcher is Emeritus Professor of Education and Language Assessment in the School of Education at the University of Leicester, UK. He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Language Testing and author of Re-examining Language Testing: A Philosophical and Social Inquiry. These two books jointly won the SAGE/ILTA Book Award in 2016. His other books include Language Testing and Assessment: An Advanced Resource Book and Testing Second Language Speaking. He has published over 100 research papers. In 2021 he received the Messick Memorial Award from Educational Testing Service, and in 2022 was elected a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is also a UK National Teaching Fellow.

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1 - Testing and assessment in context

1. Test purpose

2. Tests in educational systems

3. Testing rituals

4. Unintended consequences

5. Testing and society

6. Historical interlude I

7. The politics of language testing

8. Historical interlude II

9. Professionalising language education and testing

10. Validity

Activities

Chapter 2 - Standardised testing

1. Two paradigms

2. Testing as science

3. What’s in a curve?

4. The curve and score meaning

5. Putting it into practice

6. Test scores in a consumer age

7. Testing the test

8. Introducing reliability

9. Calculating reliability

10. Living with uncertainty

11. Reliability and test length

12. Relationships with other measures

13. Measurement

Activities

Chapter 3 - Classroom assessment

1. Life at the chalk-face

2. Assessment for learning

3. Self- and peer-assessment

4. Dynamic assessment

5. Understanding change

6. Assessment and second language acquisition

7. Criterion-referenced testing

8. Dependability

9. Assessment literacy

Activities

Chapter 4 - Deciding what to test

1. The test design cycle

2. Construct definition

3. Where do constructs come from?

4. Models of communicative competence

5. From definition to design

Activities

Chapter 5 - Designing test specifications

1. What are test specifications?

2. Specifications for testing and teaching

3. A sample detailed specification for reading test

4. Granularity

5. Performance conditions

6. Target language use domain analysis

7. Accommodations

8. Back and forth

Activities

Chapter 6 - Evaluating, prototyping and piloting

1. Investigating usefulness and usability

2. Evaluating items, tasks and specifications

3. Guidelines for multiple-choice items

4. Prototyping

5. Piloting

6. Field testing

7. Item shells

8. Operational item review and pre-testing

Activities

Chapter 7 - Scoring language tests

1. Scoring items

2. Scorability

3. Scoring constructed response tasks

4. Automated scoring

5. Corrections for guessing

6. Avoiding own goals

Activities

Chapter 8 - Aligning tests to standards

1. It’s as old as the hills

2. The definition of ‘standards’

3. The uses of standards

4. Unintended consequences revisited

5. Using standards for harmonisation and identity

6. How many standards can we afford?

7. Performance level descriptors (PLDs) and test scores

8. Some initial decisions

9. Standards-setting methodologies

10. Evaluating standard-setting

11. Training

12. The special case of CEFR

13. You can always count on uncertainty

Activities

Chapter 9 – Validity

1. Preliminaries

2. The Messick consensus

3. Argument-based validation

4. Technicalism

5. The new realism

6. Constructivism

7. Pragmatic realism

8. Conclusion

Activities

Epilogue

Appendices

Glossary

References

Index