24.4035, Calls: Applied Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics/Netherlands

Tue Oct 15 14:04:12 UTC 2013

LINGUIST List: Vol-24-4035. Tue Oct 15 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.4035, Calls: Applied Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics/Netherlands

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Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 10:03:54
From: Rebecca Present-Thomas [r.l.present-thomas at vu.nl]
Subject: Language Testing Research Colloquium

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Full Title: Language Testing Research Colloquium 
Short Title: LTRC 

Date: 04-Jun-2014 - 06-Jun-2014
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands 
Contact Person: Rebecca Present-Thomas
Meeting Email: ltrc2014 at gmail.com
Web Site: http://ltrc2014.nl/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2013 

Meeting Description:

Towards a Universal Framework

The Department of Language and Communication of VU University Amsterdam and Pearson look forward to welcoming you to Amsterdam for the 36th Language Testing and Research Colloquium, 4-6 June 2014. LTRC is the annual meeting of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA).

The origin of LTRC in 1979 is closely related to first serious attempts to develop descriptive scales of increasing functional language proficiency. In the fifties of last century the experience of the Second World War raised concerns about lack of foreign language abilities. In the USA these concerns were mainly about government employees, in particular in the military and secret services as the USA got increasingly involved in missions abroad. In Europe governments expressed these concerns primarily in relation to their citizens: functional command of each other’s languages should increase the ability from different countries to communicate and understand each other. Meanwhile Australia launched an immigration program to absorb Europeans displaced by the war. With more than three million people immigrating over two decades the need was felt to develop a system specifying second language competency and describing the learning path to functional language proficiency.

By the seventies these concerns turned into actions and a number of concrete products were developed. In the USA the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) was formed and produced the ILR scale, also known as the FSI scale after its origin with the US Foreign Service Institute. In Europe the Threshold level was published by the Council of Europe soon to be followed by the Waystage level and ultimately developed into the descriptive scale incorporated in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. In Australia David Ingram published the Australian Second Language Proficiency Ratings (ASLPR, later renamed as ISLPR).

In the first years of LTRC three main parties were involved in the discussion, academics, US language testing companies and the US government agencies. Gradually more and more scholars from other parts of the world joined in the discussions. The development of LTRC from a North American gathering into an international event was acknowledged in 1992 by the foundation of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) with LTRC as its annual conference and in 1993 LTRC travelled outside of North America for the first time.

Throughout LTRC’s history describing developing language proficiency has been the Holy Grail, a thread across its various annual themes. Indeed the original validity theme is about the relation between test scores and degrees of real live ability to use the language tested.

However successful the various frameworks and their related scales have been, they all need improvement and adaptation to current new insights in second and foreign language acquisition. Furthermore we see that the need for well-founded structural descriptive scales is growing in the emerging markets as they increasingly wish to participate in the global economy. To meet those demands the scales originated in specific cultural contexts, be it Australian, American, or European need to take account of variations in the learning routes across the world and develop a truly universal validity.

Now is the time to seek common ground for the ILR scale and its offspring, the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), with its deterministic, Guttman approach to scaling, the ASLPR (now ISLPR) based on classical distribution theory, and the Common European Framework descriptive system, which using Rasch scaling is based on a probabilistic model. As each of these scales relates progress to real world functional skills, it should be possible to make the necessary improvements of each move towards a common, universally valid descriptive system.

Call for Papers:

We invite proposals dealing with the theme of development of our field Towards a Universal Framework, specifically discussing

- Diagnosing progress and taking account of differentially developing skills
- Supporting classroom teachers to structure their teaching
- Supporting learners by providing evidence of their strengths and weaknesses
- Increasing transparency of test results for learners, teachers and parents
- Describing progress unequivocally based on psychometrically robust definitions
- Age-dependent descriptors and how they relate to the universal scale
- Regional variations and how they relate to a universal scale
- Academic discipline-dependent descriptors and how they relate to a universal scale
- Job-related descriptors and how they relate to a universal scale
- Defining what it means to know a foreign/second language theory and or data

The deadline for submitting proposals is 10 November 2013 at midnight Anywhere on Earth.

Proposals can be for papers, posters or works in progress.

Papers will be 30 minutes total with 20 minutes presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-4035	
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