Activities

Professor Antony John Kunnan, a distinguished scholar in the field of TESOL and language assessment, delivered a speech entitled "Fairness and Justice: Principles and Public Reasoning" to an audience of 60 interested professors and teachers in the Meeting Room in the Applied Mechanics Building of NTU on October 22, 2012.

The speech provided principled foundational basis for fairness and justice in language assessment. After outlining the utilitarian and libertarian views, and the more modern arguments of John Rawls and Amartya Sen, Professor Kunnan proposed two principles of fairness and justice: an assessment ought to be fair to all test takers, and an assessment institution ought to bring benefits to society and advance justice through public reasoning. Drawing on the instance of differential pricing in assessment, he demonstrated that the issue of fairness and justice can at once be intuitive and controversial. He concluded by suggesting that each institution needs to develop its own principles of fairness and justice.

Professor Kunnan is a consultant for the GEPT since 2008. He currently teaches at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Test Taker Characteristics and Test Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1995), editor of Fairness and Validation in Language Assessment (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and co-author (with Lyle Bachman) of Workbook and CD for Statistical Analysis for Language Assessment (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He has been the founding editor of Language Assessment Quarterly (published by Routledge) since 2003.