Fairness and Validation in Language Assessment: Selected Papers from the 19th Language Testing Research Colloquium, Orlando, Florida

Fairness of language tests and testing practices has always been a concern among test developers and test users. In the past decade educational and language assessment researchers have begun to focus directly on fairness and related matters such as test standards, test bias and equity and ethics for testing professionals. The 19th annual Language Testing Research Colloquium held in 1997 in Orlando, Florida, brought this overall concern into sharp focus by having 'Fairness in Language Testing' as its theme. The conference presentations and discussions attempted to understand the concept of fairness, define the scope of the concept and connect it with the concept of validation of test score interpretation. The papers in this volume offer a first introduction to fairness and validation in the field of language assessment.

Table of Contents:
1. Fairness and justice for all; 2. Fairness in language testing; 3. Language, meaning, and marking agenda; 4. Fairnesses in language testing; 5. Enhanced fairness through a social contract; 6. What, if any, are the limits of our responsability for fairness in language testing?; 7. Non-native varieties and issues of fairness in testing English as a world language 8. Assessing the communication skills of veterinary students. Whose criteria? 9. Is it fair to assess native and non-native speakers in common on school foreign language examinations? The case of Italian in Australia; 10. Identifying suspect item bundles for the detection of differential bundle functioning in an EFL reading test: a preliminary study;11. Validation of holistic scores for ESL writing assessment: How raters evaluate compositions12. Ratings, raters and test performance: an exploratory study;13. A job-relevant listening summary translation exam in Minnan;14. Schema theory and selected response item formats: from theory to practice;15. Reading research and its implications for reading assessment; 16. A post-modern view of language assessment.