There will be very few language teachers who have no involvement in assessment. Most will say that they write assessments and many will say they have a lot of experience in this area. But what do they actually know. By definition there are exceptions to all generalisations, but in my experience assessment literacy is severely lacking in the ELT world. That is not necessarily a criticism, but it should be changed. While we are unlikely to change the world with our podcast, we would like to look at some core aspects of language assessment in the next Delivering Development episodes. At the moment we are thinking in terms of the questions to ask before you start, the development process and questions to ask after you have “finished”.
While Kevin, Laura and Neil all have specific interests in language assessment, we are also lucky enough to have a British Council researcher from their Assessment Research Group with us as a guest for the next podcast, and possibly for some future ones as well.
My reason for this post is first as a general heads-up: I hope to be publishing the next episode at the beginning of December. But my other reason is to find out if anybody has a question about any specific aspects of language assessment that they think we could possibly respond to in a podcast format. If you do, either comment on this blog post or mail me at kevin.westbrook@psa.eu.com.