Expanding Horizons and Unresolved Conundrums: Language Testing and Assessment

Since the last TESOL Quarterly commemorative issue 15 years ago, there have been too many important developments in language testing and assessment for all of them to be discussed in a single article. Therefore, this article focuses on issues that we believe are integrally linked to pedagogic and curriculum concerns of English language teaching. Although the discussion has been organized into two main sections, the first dealing with issues relating to formal tests and the second to broader concerns of assessment, we highlight the common themes and concerns running through both sections in the belief that testing and assessment are two sides of the same educational coin. In the first section we address the issue of test authenticity, which underscores much of language testing enquiry. We consider developments in the field's understanding of this notion and suggest that relating test authenticity to target language use may be necessary but insufficient without considering authenticity as it is operationalised in the classroom. In the second section, acknowledging current concerns with standardized psychometric testing, we broaden the discussion to issues of validity, ethics, and alternative assessment. We first consider the intellectual climate in which the debates on such issues has developed and the relevance of these deliberations to pedagogy and curriculum. We then discuss some of the key issues in current classroom-based teacher assessment that are related to and can inform student second language competence and teacher professional knowledge and skills. We end by projecting how the current globalization of English may affect the understanding of authenticity and how this understanding is likely to affect testing and assessment practices worldwide.