[EDLING:2176] CFP: Kant revisited: Testing

[Tamara Warhol]

Full Title: Kant revisited: Testing

Date: 24-Aug-2008 - 29-Aug-2008
Location: Essen, Germany
Contact Person: Una Dirks
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Web Site: http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/~dirks/Texte/Dirks-AILA2008.pdf

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

Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2008

Meeting Description:

AILA 2008, thematic strand 'Language Evaluation, Assessment and Testing'

Full title: Immanuel Kant revisited: testing the output and outcomes of 
L1,2,n reading/ written/visual literacy or discourse competencies.

This symposion aims at the presentation of a wide array of assessment 
and evaluation measures with regard to reading, written and/or visual 
literacy and discourse competencies in different institutionalised and 
non-institutionalised domains (e.g. school, vocational training, 
professional fields like business, journalism/media, any other 
biographically relevant learning context) from a clear-cut educational 
perspective.

Nowadays, formative or summative assessment and evaluation have become 
well-established measures to meet the demands of accountability in 
education systems and in all kinds of professional fields. For example, 
the PISA-Consortium has made great efforts to develop test concepts and 
items on the background of a functional approach of education. However, 
this approach and its operationalisation by specific proficiency scales 
and levels could be improved or even substituted, if there were more 
elaborated theoretical heuristics and empirical results at hand being 
committed to testing the educational output and/or, if possible, the 
educational outcomes.

Researchers from text-, pragma- and sociolinguistics, as well as from 
applied, cognitive or educational linguistics are invited to put their 
empirically tested concepts to the fore (e.g. portfolio, semi-structural 
interviews on learning biographies, assessment dialogues, oral 
proficiency interviews, tests of second language pragmatics, Discourse 
Complementary Tests, Information Gap Tasks in interaction, Cloze-tests, 
test constructs on the basis of the Item Response Theory) and to discuss 
the achieved competencies in terms of their educational impact to be 
identified as a specific output or as somehow measurable outcomes. In 
this context, we would appreciate a discussion on im-/possibilities of 
controling presage and process variables that are supposed to have an 
impact on the learning effects (output, outcomes).

For more information, particularly concerning the educational concept, 
please visit the following links:

http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/~dirks/Texte/Dirks-AILA2008.pdf or
http://www.zhwin.ch/departement-l/download-l/sfe/Dirks-Werlen_AILA2008.pdf.

Speakers will have 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for 
discussion.

Submissions:

We invite proposals on all topics related to the meeting description. 
Papers are particulary welcome, if they provide details on the knowledge 
base of the output and outcomes in non-/ institutionalised learning 
contexts, for example, bearing on subject-, discipline-, profession- 
and/or gender-specific language-related knowledge features. Apart from 
that the chosen genre formats of the applied test items should be taken 
into account. An open question we would like to discuss with all 
participants of our session refers to chances and constraints of 
testing, if we would not conceive the target language as homogenised.

The AILA will only accept papers that include original research (e.g. 
the new research focus on differing between output and outcomes) and 
have not yet been published elsewhere.

Submission format:

Proposals (max. 500-700 words) should be written in English or German 
and forwarded to the conveners by email as doc or pdf files. The 
following details should be included:

Name(s) of presenter(s), affiliation, email address(es),
The research question and competencies to be assessed/evaluated,
The data sample or corpus,
Methods of data sampling and analysis,
Methodology (e.g. criteria of good research like construct validity, 
which model of competencies),
Educational framework, if possible,
Research results.

It is previewed to publish the accepted papers in a separate volume.
For presenters from overseas or other European countries we will try to 
provide an extra funding.

If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact the conveners Prof. 
Dr. Una Dirks (dirksuni-hildesheim.de) or Prof. Dr. Erika Werlen 
(erika.werlenzhwin.ch)