1st Edition
Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions
Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions is a state-of-the-art overview of advances in theories and practices relevant to the assessment of academic English skills for higher education admissions purposes. The volume includes a brief introduction followed by four main chapters focusing on critical developments in theories and practices for assessing reading, listening, writing, and speaking, of which the latter two also address the assessment of integrated skills such as reading-writing, listening-speaking, and reading-listening-speaking. Each chapter reviews new task types, scoring approaches, and scoring technologies and their implications in light of the increasing use of technology in academic communication and the growing use of English as a lingua franca worldwide. The volume concludes with recommendations about critical areas of research and development that will help move the field forward. Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students in language testing and assessment worldwide.
CONTENTS
List of Figures
List of Tables
Series Editors’ Foreword
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1
Framing the Assessment of Academic English for Admissions Decisions
John M. Norris, John McE. Davis, and Xiaoming Xi
CHAPTER 2
Assessing Academic Reading
Mary Schedl, Tenaha O’Reilly, William Grabe, and Rob Schoonen
CHAPTER 3
Assessing Academic Listening
Spiros Papageorgiou, Jonathan Schmidgall, Luke Harding, Susan Nissan, and Robert French
CHAPTER 4
Assessing Academic Writing
Alister Cumming, Yeonsuk Cho, Jill Burstein, Philip Everson, and Robert Kantor
CHAPTER 5
Assessing Academic Speaking
Xiaoming Xi, John M. Norris, Gary J. Ockey, Glenn Fulcher, and James E. Purpura
CHAPTER 6
Looking Ahead to the Next Generation of Academic English Assessments
Carol A. Chapelle
List of Contributors
Biography
Xiaoming Xi is Chief of Product, Assessment and Learning at VIPKID International, USA.
John M. Norris is Senior Research Director of the Center for Language Education and Assessment Research at Educational Testing Service, USA.
Winner of the SAGE/ILTA Best Book Award
"Considering the increasingly complex geo- and socio-political context of language testing, there is no better time to revisit both theories and practices of testing English for Academic Purposes (EAP), especially for admission purposes. The volume moves us forward with renewed understandings of EAP."
Eunice Eunhee Jang, University of Toronto, Canada
"This volume makes a timely contribution to the language testing and assessment literature by building on both seminal work and important recent developments related to English language testing for higher education admission purposes. Each of the chapters is written by a team of leading thinkers and researchers and sets out the state-of-the-art knowledge in language assessment in each of the four skills and in combination the chapters set direction for the field for future generations of language assessments. This book will most certainly become required reading for researchers, test developers, graduate students, and interested admissions officers alike."
Ute Knoch, University of Melbourne, Australia
