Elana Shohamy -- Winner of the UCLES/ILTA Lifetime Achievement Award

[Nancy Hornberger]

Dec 10 2009
 [LTEST-L] *

Prof. Elana Shohamy -- Winner of the UCLES/ILTA Lifetime Achievement Award

*On behalf of the review committee for the UCLES/ILTA Lifetime 
Achievement Award (consisting of Sarah Briggs, Nick Saville, Carolyn 
Turner and J Charles Alderson) it is a great pleasure to announce that 
after carefully considering the several highly meritorious nominations 
received from the field, *Professor Elana Shohamy* has been selected to 
receive the Lifetime Achievement Award to be presented at the 32nd 
ILTA/LTRC meeting which will be held in Cambridge, UK in April 2010.

Over a long career, Elana has maintained her programme of empirical 
research, her insider critical critique of the basis of language 
assessment and her concern for understanding the interaction between 
language assessment and  language policy. After completing her PhD at 
the University of Minnesota in 1978, she soon started to raise questions 
about the nature and use of tests. It is particularly in this area that 
her influence has been most felt: her recognition of the power of tests, 
whether in education or in immigration, built the critical link between 
testing and language policy, showing language tests to be one of the 
most common instruments for enforcing language policy; her influence was 
the core of the growing emphasis on ethics.

In her career, she has built a number of significant tests and has made 
major contributions to the understanding of washback and other key 
research areas. The quality of her research and scholarship has built 
her a major place as a leader in the field, combining academic and 
professional activities. Furthermore, her example and teaching have 
built a generation of language testers who look to her as a leader. She 
is Professor of Language Education at Tel Aviv University but she has 
taught at a large number of universities in various parts of the world, 
was the research director at the National Foreign Language Center in 
Washington, DC, and is affiliated with CALPER (Center for Advanced 
Language Proficiency Education at Research) at the Pennsylvania State 
University.

She was one of the founders of an early national language testing group 
(ACROLT), chaired the AILA Commission on Language Testing and 
Evaluation, and served as President of ILTA in 1999. Apart from her own 
extensive list of publications, she has played a major role in editing, 
serving on the editorial boards of /Language Testing, Language 
Assessment Quarterly/ and the /Modern Language Journal/ and as founding 
co-editor of /Language Policy/.

Because of her many significant contributions over the years, the 
committee is pleased to announce that Professor Elana Shohamy has been 
selected to receive the 2010 UCLES/ILTA Lifetime Achievement Award.

J Charles Alderson
Chair, 2010 UCLES/ILTA Lifetime Achievement Award Committee

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