Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions is a state-of-the-art overview of advances in theories and practices relevant to the assessment of academic English skills for higher education admissions purposes. The volume includes a brief introduction followed by four main chapters focusing on critical developments in theories and practices for assessing reading, listening, writing, and speaking, of which the latter two also address the assessment of integrated skills such as reading-writing, listening-speaking, and reading-listening-speaking. Each chapter reviews new task types, scoring approaches, and scoring technologies and their implications in light of the increasing use of technology in academic communication and the growing use of English as a lingua franca worldwide. The volume concludes with recommendations about critical areas of research and development that will help move the field forward. Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students in language testing and assessment worldwide.

English-medium universities around the world face real challenges in ensuring that incoming students have the language and literacy skills they need to cope with the demands of their degree programmes. One response has been a variety of institutional initiatives to assess students after admission, in order to identify those with significant needs and advise them on how to enhance their academic language ability. This volume brings together papers from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Oman, South Africa and the United States, written by language assessment specialists who discuss issues in the design and implementation of these post-admission assessments in their own institutions. A major theme running through the book is the need to evaluate the validity of such assessments not just on their technical quality but on their impact, in terms of giving students access to effective means of developing their language skills and ultimately enhancing their academic achievement.

Reveals practices and issues in higher education admissions, which are critical factors for improving worldwide access and equity.

This book focuses on strategies and procedures for assessing the academic language ability of students entering an English-medium university, so that those with significant needs can have access to opportunities to enhance their language skills.

"A research-based ... grammar series for beginning- to advanced-level students of North American English. The series focuses on the grammar structures most commonly used in North American English, with an emphasis on the application of the grammar structures to academic writing. ... It is designed for use both in the classroom and as a self-study learning tool"--Introduction.

A frank and critical appraisal of English language proficiency as a key issue in higher education today.

Fundamental Considerations in Technology Mediated Language Assessment aims to address issues such as how the forced integration of technology into second language assessment has shaped our understanding of key traditional concepts like validity, reliability, washback, authenticity, ethics, fairness, test security, and more. Although computer-assisted language testing has been around for more than two decades in the context of high-stakes proficiency testing, much of language testing worldwide has shifted to “at-home” mode, and relies heavily on the mediation of digital technology, making its widespread application in classroom settings in response to the COVID-19 outbreak unprecedented. Integration of technology into language assessment has brought with it countless affordances and at the same time challenges, both theoretically and practically. One major theoretical consideration requiring attention is the way technology has contributed to a reconceptualization of major assessment concepts/constructs. There is very limited literature available on the theoretical underpinnings of technology mediated language assessment. This book aims to fill this gap. This book will appeal to academic specialists, practitioners, or professionals in the field of language assessment, advanced and/or graduate students, and a range of scholars or professionals in disciplines like educational technology, applied linguistics, and teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL).