Thom Hudson

Over the past decade criterion-referenced testing (CRT) has become an emerging issue in language assessment. Most language testing books have hitherto focused almost exclusively on norm-referenced testing, whereby test takers’ scores are interpreted with reference to the performance of other test takers, and have ignored CRT, an approach that examines the level of knowledge of a specific domain of target behaviours. This book is designed to comprehensively address the wide variety of CRT and decision-making needs that more and more language-teaching professionals must address in their daily work. Criterion-referenced Language Testing is the first volume to create a nexus between the theoretical constructs and practical applications of this new area of language testing.

This technical report focuses on the decision-making potential provided by second language performance assessments. The authors first situate performance assessment within a broader discussion of alternatives in language assessment and in educational assessment in general. Then they discuss issues in performance assessment design, implementation, reliability and validity. Finally, they present a prototype framework for second language performance assessment, based on the integration of theoretical underpinnings and research findings from the task-based language teaching literature, the language testing literature, and the educational measurement literature. The authors outline test and item specifications, and present examples of prototypical language tasks. They also propose a research agenda based on performance assessments.