Rachel L. Shively

Development of assessments in L2 Spanish during study abroad

ABSTRACTThis study examines the development of speaker and listener assessments by second language (L2) learners of Spanish during a semester abroad in Spain. Assessments express the speaker’s judgment, attitude, or affect towards what is said and perform the crucial functions of closing a topic and displaying shared understanding with an interlocutor. The results indicate that learners increased their use of listener assessments, as well as their use of specific structures and lexical items in speaker assessments. Participation in everyday conversation as well as explicit instruction represented ways that students could learn to make assessments. The article concludes with suggestions for teaching assessments in the Spanish L2 classroom.

Book Review: Testing for language teachers. 2nd edition

A useful resource for language teachers new to the field of assessment, Testing for language teachers (2nd edition) provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the basic theories and methods involved in language testing. As in the first edition of the book, the author offers straightforward descriptions of testingrelated concepts such as reliability, validity, and washback, practical suggestions for creating and administering language assessments that reflect these points, as well as specific techniques for assessing each of the four skill areas of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Although the primary focus of the book is language testing in the post-secondary context, much of the information is also relevant for other levels of instruction, including a chapter new to the second edition entitled ‘Tests for young learners’, in which the assessment of children’s language ability is addressed. Other changes to the second edition include expanded sections on test techniques, testing overall ability, and statistical analysis, as well as the addition of a short appendix on item banking. While all of the examples in the book are directed toward testing English as a second language, the concepts and techniques are generalizable to the assessment of other languages. The first two chapters of the book begin with a short discussion about the relationship between testing and instruction and the importance of developing tests that not only accurately measure students’ language abilities but also promote positive washback that is, impact language learning in a beneficial way. In order to encourage positive washback, as Hughes (p. 53) comments in a later chapter, language teachers should ‘test the abilities whose development you