Assessment in the Language Classroom

Liying Cheng is Professor and a Director of the Assessment and Evaluation Group (AEG) at the Faculty of Education, Queen's University. She conducts the majority of her research within the context of teaching and learning English as a second/foreign language (including immersion and bilingual contexts). Janna Fox is Associate Professor and Director of the Language Assessment and Testing Research Unit in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University. She has extensive experience working with language teachers in such varied contexts as Pakistan, Seychelles, and Qatar. She is the recipient of a 3M Teaching Fellowship, a national award in Canada for outstanding scholarship and leadership in higher education.

This book is an excellent resource for language teachers and teacher educators. The foregrounding of the learner and explicit engagement with feedback and motivation in language learning and assessment set it apart from other introductory texts on language assessment. It could function as a stand-alone professional development resource for groups of language teachers who have formed a community of practice and would also be extremely effective for use in language teacher education courses.

• 1. Why do we assess?2. What do we assess?3. How do we assess?4. How do we develop a high quality classroom test?5. Who are we assessing? Placement, needs analysis, and diagostics6. Who are we assessing? Feedback and motivation7. When we assess, how can we use assessment to move forward?