Canadian Association of Language Assessment / Association canadienne pour l'évaluation des langues

​

Language testing has been hamstrung by its structuralist legacy, perpetuated for example in the models of Canale and Swain (1980) and Bachman (1990).  What are the costs?  Examples are given of the need for a radically revised understanding of what underlies successful communicative performance, from language assessments in aviation, academic writing and health.  The challenge of English as a lingua franca threatens the prerogative of the native speaker in assessment, one of the fundamental underpinnings of tests in our field.

CALA winter Event 2016 featured talk

Changing the construct: Moving beyond the structuralist legacy in language testing

Tim McNamara, The University of Melbourne

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2016,  YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO, ONTARIO

For details, contact Beverly.Baker@uottawa.ca

Tim McNamara is Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at The University of Melbourne.  Building on a career as an EFL/ESL teacher and teacher trainer in Australia and the United Kingdom, Tim McNamara has taught Applied Linguistics at Melbourne since 1987. He established the graduate program in Applied Linguistics, and with Professor Alan Davies founded the Language Testing Research Centre.  His language testing research has focused on performance assessment, theories of validity, the use of Rasch models, and the social and political meaning of language tests. Tim has acted as a consultant with Educational Testing Service, Princeton where he worked on the development of the speaking sub-test of TOEFL iBT; he was part of the team involved in the original development of IELTS; and he created the Occupational English Test (OET), a specific purpose English language test for health professionals. His work on language and identity has focused on poststructuralist approaches to identity and subjectivity. Tim is the author of Measuring Second Language Performance (Longman, 1996), Language Testing (OUP, 2000) and co-author (with Carsten Roever) of Language Testing: The Social Dimension (Blackwell, 2006). He is currently working on a book entitled Language and Subjectivity, to be published by De Gruyter. Tim has been elected 2nd Vice-President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and will be Conference Chair for the 2017 conference in Portland, OR.