Large Scale Language Assessments

Abstract

There are a variety of purposes for large-scale language assessment, but the main features of these tests is the uniformity of tests and testing practice across geographical regions, administration time, test raters and score interpretation. While this emphasis on uniformity has served large scale language assessment reasonably well, there have been criticisms regarding the inflexibility of test conceptualization and design, a lack of fairness research, andinadequate skills diagnosis and feedback to score users. These topics and challenges are discussed after a brief examination of the early developments of large scale language assessment.