Corpus linguistics in language testing research

This special issue of Language Testing grew out of a 2016 annual joint colloquium at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference between AAAL and the International Language Testing Association. It addresses the methodological issues arising as a result of growing connections between corpus linguistics and language testing. As was the case in the colloquium, the issue includes five original papers (one of which is a replacement for a paper that was presented at the colloquium) and responses from a corpus linguist and assessment specialist. The five papers represent a broad variety of methodologies, research questions, and applications to language assessment, but each one illustrates the use of corpus linguistics to investigate the level of support for inferences in validity arguments either through comparative analyses of two or more relevant corpora or by using corpus data to examine previously held beliefs about language.