Language testing expert heads East

Professor Glenn Fulcher from our School of Education is off to Japan next month and then to China in October, spreading his expertise about language testing.

As editor of leading journal Language Testing and author of widely-used text books including Practical Language Testing (Hodder, 2010) and Language Testing and Assessment (Routledge, 2007), Glenn knows a thing or two about current trends in this constantly developing field. It may sound specialised but in a global economy it is vital that commerce, industry and education can accurately and fairly assess individuals’ competence in non-native languages.

Temple University Japan is an overseas branch of Temple University Philadelphia. Founded in 1982, it is the oldest foreign campus in Japan and in 2005 became the first foreign university to be recognised by the government as equivalent to Japanese universities. One of TUJ’s specialist areas is TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and each year three notable academics are invited to deliver a Distinguished Lecturer Series of seminars – among them, our own Professor Fulcher.

Glenn will deliver three hours on ‘The Architecture of Assessment’, the increasingly popular use of architectural principles as insightful metaphors for language assessment, in Osaka on 22 September. This is open to the public, should you happen to be in the area, and will be followed by nine hours (over two days) of further seminars for doctoral and MA students. The following weekend, he does it all again in Tokyo.

A month later, Glenn is back on another long-haul flight, this time heading for Xi’an in China where he will give the plenary address to the Academic Forum on English Language Testing in Asia (AFELTA). This massive annual event brings together Examining Boards from mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, and is this year hosted by the Chinese College Entrance Test (CET).

Glenn will speak on the topic of assessing second language speaking in large-scale tests, which is appropriate as the CET is the largest test in the world, sat by 18.5 million people every year!