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It is increasingly recognised that attention should be paid to investigating the needs of a new test, especially in contexts where specific purpose language needs might be identified. This article describes the stages involved in establishing the need for a new assessment of English for professional purposes in China. We first investigated stakeholders' perceptions of the target language use activities and the necessity of the proposed assessment. We then analysed five existing tests and six language frameworks to evaluate their suitability for the need of the proposed assessment. The resulting proposal is for an advanced-level English assessment capable of providing a diagnostic evaluation of the proficiency of potential employees in areas of relevance to multinationals operating in China. The study has demonstrated the value of following a principled procedure to investigate the necessity for and the needs of a new test at the very beginning of the test development.

This study examines the production of topical talk in peer collaborative negotiation in an interactive assessment innovation context. The ability to stay on topic, to move from topic to topic and to introduce new topics appropriately is at the core of communicative competence. Applying conversation analysis (CA), we describe and analyze how one group of secondary ESL students orient to and construct what they take to be relevant to the assessment task as interaction proceeds. We found that in the context of group oral discussion described in our study, in the course of turn-by-turn interaction which was characterized by intensive engagement and active participation between peer participants, this group of students were able to pursue, develop, and shift topics to, on the one hand, ensure the successful completion of the assigned task, and on the other, to display individual contributions. Topical transitions appeared to be the result of participants constantly monitoring the content of talk for relevance to the assessment task agenda. Such negotiation of topical talk among the participants indicates that peer group discussion as an oral assessment format has the potential to provide opportunities for students to demonstrate "real-life" interactional abilities to relate to each other in spoken interaction.

Davison and Leung (this issue) describe the field of teacher-based English language assessment as having "much variability, a lack of systematic principles and procedures and a dearth of information as to the impact of teacher-based assessments on learning and teaching" (p. 389). In this article, the author briefly explores an example of teacher-based assessment of oral English that has been implemented across Hong Kong and the ways which elements of practice have contributed to or inhibited the establishment of the systematic key principles that are needed to establish any form of large-scale alternative assessment. (Contains 6 footnotes.)

The two authors conducted a small empirical study to attempt to find support for--or evidence against--the view that international tests of English language proficiency are unfair to speakers of non-standards forms of English, since these tests privilege standard forms. We explore the question of whose norms should be imposed in these tests, and what the consequences for test-takers are if the norm imposed by the test is not the "normal" variety accepted in their own society. Data used for the study are written texts by English learners from six language backgrounds, scored by raters from their own language backgrounds as well as by native American English raters. Interesting patterns emerge, but we conclude that the complexity of the variables involved, the small n-size, and the inherent unreliability of scoring productive samples prevent any definitive claims being made.

Progress assessment aims to assess students' performance and progress during a course of study. Its purpose is primarily developmental--to help students improve learning. Progress assessment is of special value in distance education in that it can motivate or pace distance learners throughout their course of study. It can help the tutor monitor the learning process of distance learners, diagnose their problems and provide prompt help and support. However, few empirical studies have been reported in the literature that address the issue of progress assessment from the perspective of Chinese distance learners. This paper investigates the perceptions of Chinese distance learners with regard to the necessity of progress assessment and the way it is being implemented in practice. (Contains 1 table.)

Introduces this new journal devoted to developments and understandings in the field of English for academic purposes. Briefly sketches the context within which the journal has emerged and points to some of the issues that currently influence and confront the discipline. (Author/VWL)

Describes a project in which participating faculty used a videotaped teaching session to observe and reflect on the theoretical underpinnings of their classroom decision making, the extent to which they are meeting their own perceptions and expectations of themselves as high-quality teachers, and the ways in which they might improve. (EV)

Explores developments in the philosophy and epistemology of language testing with particular reference to the notion of "responsibility." Argues that as the millennium changes, language testing is at a point of change, as well. (Author/VWL)

Genre-based approaches to curriculum delivery have been applied to primary, secondary, tertiary, and graduate programs. This article takes this approach one step further and shows how such an approach was applied in conceptualizing a funded staff-development program at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. (Author/VWL)

Provides a form of argumentative dialectic to Liz Hamp-Lyons's forum commentary published in an earlier issue of this journal, "Ethical Test Preparation Practice: The Case of TOEFL." Hamp-Lyons responds to the comments.(Author/VWL)

Links the theory of washback with the broader concept of impact in educational measurement and to the recent debate on construct validity associated with Messick. Notes that for many years it was asserted that language tests negatively impacted teaching and learning, an impact known as washback. (25 references) (Author/CK)

Investigation of the use of a multiple-trait scoring procedure to obtain communicative writing profiles of adult nonnative English speakers found that the scoring method was highly reliable in composite assessment, but provided little psychometric support for assessing certain individual writing components. (28 references) (Author/CB)