Practical Language Testing: How Knowing God Makes a Difference in Our Daily Lives

Practical Language Testing equips you with the skills, knowledge and principles necessary to understand and construct language tests. This intensely practical book gives guidelines on the design of assessments within the classroom, and provides the necessary tools to analyse and improve assessments, as well as deal with alignment to externally imposed standards. Testing is situated both within the classroom and within the larger social context, and readers are provided the knowledge necessary to make realistic and fair decisions about the use and implementation of tests. The book explains the normative role of large scale testing and provides alternatives that the reader can adapt to their own context. This fulfils the dual purpose of providing the reader with the knowledge they need to prepare learners for tests, and the practical skills for using assessment for learning. Practical Language Testing is the ideal introduction for students of applied linguistics, TESOL and modern foreign language teaching as well as practicing teachers required to design or implement language testing programmes. The book is supported by frequently updated online resources at http://languagetesting.info/ including sets of scenarios providing resources to study aviation English assessment, call centre assessment, military language assessment, and medical language assessment. The materials can be used to structure debates and seminars, with pre-reading and video activities. Practical Language Testing was commended as a 2012 runner-up of the prestigious SAGE/ILTA Award for Best Book on Language Testing.

Table of Contents:
1. Testing and assessment in context 2. Standardised testing 3. Classroom assessment 4. Deciding what to test 5. Designing test specifications 6. Evaluating, prototyping and piloting 7. Scoring language tests 8. Aligning tests to standards 9. Test administration 10. Testing and teaching Epilogue Glossary

About the Author :
Glenn Fulcher is Senior Lecturer in Education (TESOL), University of Leicester, UK

Review :
'I enjoyed reading this book and found it very stimulating. It has a wealth of interesting ideas from a whole range of sources within the language testing literature and beyond. It reflects current thinking about the nature of language assessment and engages with the problem areas that we all have to grapple with...A strong feature of the book is the Activities section at the end of each chapter. Many of these are...really well-conceived tasks based on interesting stimulus material that encourage readers to explore further and apply the ideas presented in the chapter'. John Read, University of Auckland, New Zealand 'Practical Language Testing offers an overview of the field of language assessment and provides instructions and guidelines for creating language tests that readers will likely find readable and useful...[T]he numerous examples from global contexts, the links to online resources and websites, and the extensive coverage of language testing theories make the text ideal for a range of language assessment classrooms in diverse contexts'. Linguistics and Education 23 'an integral contribution to fostering language assessment literacy... this book deserves high recommendation to the international language testing community' Language Assessment Quarterly 'The presentation and discussion of material within this volume not only represents current trends in testing and assessment, but also invites both application and critique in a manner that will be of interest to a broad audience including students, teachers and seasoned language testers...Fulcher's balance of the technical and interpretive illustrates the potential and the challenges of language testing.' Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33:04