Language Testing in the 1990s: The Communicative Legacy [antikvár]

Introduction J Charles Alderson University of Lancaster Brian North Eurocentre Learning Service, Zurich Almost all the chapters in this volume were given as papers at the lATEFL Language Testing Symposium entitled Language Testing in the 1990s: The Communicative Legacy held in Bournemouth 17-19 November 1989. lATEFL is the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, and the event was organised under the banner of the Testing Special Interest Group. The Testing Special Interest Group was founded in 1986, and seeks to bring together academic testing researchers, examination boards, and practitioners in the field. During the 1980s there had been a number of large scale testing projects, but no British testing event at which the State ofthe Art was discussed since the colloquia at Lancaster and Reading in 1980 and 1981, later published as Alderson Hughes, 1981 and Hughes Porter, 1983. Those events had been preceded by a State of the Art article (Davies 1978), and so the publication of a new State of the Art article (Skehan 1988) suggested that another colloquium might be opportune, to review developments in language testing since the appearance of Alderson Hughes, 1981 and look forward to the issues likely to be prominent in the 1990s. In view of the aims of the Testing Special Interest Group, the event was organised as a tripartite affair, with the academic colloquium, from which the chapters in Part One of this volume originate, complemented by presentations on developments in the field, from which the chapters in Part Two originate, together with an examination fair and panel discussion put on by the examination boards listed on the facing page, who were kind enough to sponsor the attendance of lATEFL members not supported by their institutions. This volume is consequently divided into two major parts: • The first consists of the papers presented at the Colloquium within the Symposium by academic language testing researchers, and the invited responses. This part addresses and develops issues relevant to theoretical and practical developments in the general field of language testing, and both draws upon and discusses ideas in the two