Activities

On June 22, 2010, the LTTC invited Professor Antony John Kunnan, an internationally-noted scholar in the field of language assessment, to give a lecture entitled 「How Are We to Evaluate A Language Assessment?」 and share his research experience and observations with a large audience. Professor Kunnan is currently Division Chair of Applied and Advanced Studies in Education at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Test Taker Characteristics and Test Performance: A Structural Modeling Approach (Cambridge, 1995) and the editor of the journal Language Assessment Quarterly. He has edited books such as Validation in Language Assessment and Fairness (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998) and Validation in Language Assessment (Cambridge, 1999).

Professor Kunnan believes that tests should benefit society, and for this to take place test evaluations must include analyses from the Test Context Framework and the Fairness Framework combined with validation evidence . The Context Framework examines tests from political, economic, educational, social, cultural, infrastructure and legal perspectives, while the Fairness Framework analyzes tests on the basis of validity, absence of bias, access, administration and consequences. In his lecture, Professor Kunnan also gave examples to demonstrate the importance of applying these two frameworks.