NEW BOOK FOR 2025
The 2nd edition of Practical Language Testing is now available. The chapters are widely edited and brought up to date from the first edition, with a stronger focus on test building and validation. To achieve this there is a new chapter on validity, covering traditional formulations through Messick, the post-Messick fragmentation, and reintegration through effect-driven testing. The approach is both descriptive and critical.
This is the only language testing textbook that is based on research into language assessment literacy and a clear pedagogic model. The first stage of the research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, was a definition of what we need to know as practitioners to design and build tests. Read this research here:
Fulcher, G. (2012). Assessment literacy for the language classroom. Language Assessment Quarterly 9, 2, 113 - 132.
The structure was then turned into an approach to pedagogy based on the pre-Aristotelean notion of apprenticeship, which combines practice and theory in the act of creation. You can read about this model, which informs the approach to learning in the book here:
Fulcher, G.(2020). Operationalizing Assessment Literacy. In Tsagari, D. (Ed.) Language Assessment Literacy: From Theory to Practice (pp. 8 -28). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
The book looks at both high-stakes and classroom oriented assessment. I argue that that these are different paradigms, with very different validity criteria. You may read about the outline of this theory that informs the structure and content of chapters 2 and 3 here:
Fulcher, G. (2021). Language Assessment Literacy in a Learning-Oriented Assessment Framework. In Gebril, A. (Ed.) Learning-oriented language assessment: Putting theory into practice. London and New York: Routledge.
This website was built using Flash, which has now been discontinued. I have therefore transferred all videos and podcasts my YouTube Channel.
Interested in context in language testing? My feature analysis has been updated, with additional downloadable content.
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