Textbook trends in teaching language testing

Abstract

The article examines changes in language testing textbooks in English since Lado (1961) and proposes that two trends may be discerned. The first shows how the growing professionalism of the field has required an expansion in teaching materials to meet the need for new training programmes. What the expansion also shows is the desire, again a mark of increasing professionalism, to provide all teaching resources from within the profession so that for needed skills (e.g. statistics and measurement) it is now less necessary to appeal to outsiders such as statisticians and psychometricians. The second trend explains the need for the profession to expand its view of the skills needed by its members. From Lado onwards, skills were always conjoined with knowledge about language and about testing. More recently, the profession has explicitly declared a concern for principles with regard, for example, to validity and to ethics. The increasing professionalism comes at a cost: that cost is twofold: in-housing all resources means that language testers are increasingly insulated from other potentially rewarding disciplines. And the complete resource offerings in the later teaching materials means that students may be denied empirical encounters with real language learners, spending all (or much of) their training within the resource material. The article also questions how far research has informed the changes in training materials.