The assessment of language learners is having a growing impact in English language teaching and applied linguistics. A formal evaluation of students' writing abilities is important for language teachers in order to assess the pedagogical needs of their students. While there has been a considerable body of work undertaken on assessing the writing abilities of native speakers, the issues surrounding the assessment of second language learners' writing abilities are still emerging.
As speaking is one of the core language skills, formal evaluation of students' speaking abilities is crucial for language teachers in order to assess the pedagogical needs of their students. To date, the issues surrounding the assessment of second language learners' speaking abilities have not been explored in depth. This volume is the first to consider these assessment issues and their implication for language teaching practitioners wishing to evaluate their students' speaking abilities.
In 1998 and 1999, three of the largest providers of educational tests introduced computer-based versions of proficiency tests for English as a foreign language. Around the same time, many institutions began to offer Web-based tests for particular language courses and classes. These two phenomena have greatly added to the momentum of work in computer-assisted testing and mean that assessment through computer technology is becoming a fact for language learners in educational settings and therefore for teachers and researchers.
A renewed interest in grammar, from pedagogical and research perspectives, has created the need for new approaches to assessing the grammatical ability of language learners. This book presents a comprehensive framework of second language grammatical knowledge and uses this as a base to help readers create their own assessment tools to test students' grammar.
This classic study is still the only comprehensive theory of child language acquisition—one that begins with the infant, proceeds step by step according to explicit learning algorithms, mirrors children's development, and ends up with adult grammatical competence. Now reprinted with new commentary by the author that updates of every section, Language Learnability and Language Developmentcontinues to be an indispensible resource in developmental psycholinguistics.
