As Stephen Stoynoff points out in his state-of-the-art review of four major international ESOL examinations, more than 500,000 examinees take each of these tests annually, making them among the most widely used ESOL examinations in the world. The inferences and decisions made with the scores from these tests have significant consequences for examinees, score users, and society. Thus, his review will contribute to the professional discourse in several ways: by providing a context for discussing some of the fundamental considerations and persistent issues in language assessment, by demonstrating how language testing research and concerns for test consequences are affecting the test design and validation activities related to these four extremely influential assessments of L2 ability, and above all by encouraging a thorough consideration of important aspects of these high-stakes assessments. The paper is accompanied by a comparative review of books by Christine Coombe.

This review article surveys recent developments and validation activities related to four large-scale tests of L2 English ability: the iBT TOEFL, the IELTS, the FCE, and the TOEIC. In addition to describing recent changes to these tests, the paper reports on validation activities that were conducted on the measures. The results of this research constitute some of the evidence available to support claims that these tests are suitable for their intended purposes. The discussion is organized on the basis of a framework that considers test purpose, selected test method characteristics, and important aspects of test usefulness.

Angesichts gegenwärtiger Entwicklungen innerhalb des Lehr- und Forschungsgebietes Deutsch als Fremdsprache (DaF)/German as a Foreign Language (GFL) als auch im Lichte politischer Entwicklungen, die weiterhin einen deutlichen Einfluss darauf ausüben, wie DaF verbreitet, gelehrt, gelernt und evaluiert wird, scheint eine kritische Bewertung von im Zeitraum 2002–2008 veröffentlichter DaF-Forschungsbeiträge zeitgemäβ und angebracht. Empirische Forschung zu Deutsch als Fremdsprache versteht sich nicht als isoliertes Forschungsfeld das primär oder gar ausschlieβlich mit seinen kulturell, strukturell und politisch bedingten Besonderheiten beschäftigt ist, sondern vielmehr als ein substantieller Beitrag zur internationalen Zweitsprachenerwerbsforschung, Fremdsprachenunterrichtsforschung und Angewandten Linguistik. Der erste Teil unseres Forschungsüberblicks behandelt den Erwerb grammatischer und pragmatischer Aspekte des Deutschen als Fremdsprache als auch individuelle Unterschiede und Präferenzen wie Alter, Motivation und Lernerstrategien. Im Mittelpunkt des zweiten Teils stehen Forschungsbeiträge die den Einfluss kontextueller Faktoren und methodisch-didaktischer Entscheidungen auf die Bedingungen, den Prozess und das Resultat fremdsprachlichen Lernens untersuchen. Überlegungen zu alternativen, widersprüchlichen oder gar unvereinbaren epistomologischen Grundannahmen sowie einen Ausblick auf die gegenwärtige wie zukünftige Sprachenpolitik beschlieβt den zweiten Teil unseres Forschungsüberblicks.

This review of research on the learning, teaching, and assessment of L2 German published or completed between 2002 and 2008 may be particularly timely due to developments from within the profession as well as recent political changes which continue to have a strong bearing on the way L2 German is promoted, learned, taught and assessed. Far from representing an isolated field of research concerned only with the requirements and policies of its own subject matter, empirical research into L2 German now contributes greatly to the wider field of research in L2 acquisition, applied linguistics, and foreign language teaching. Part one of this article covers studies on the acquisition of grammatical and pragmatic aspects as well as individual differences and choices such as age, motivation, and learner strategies. Part two will cover research concerned with the impact of contextual factors and pedagogical choices on learning conditions, learning processes, and learning outcomes. A consideration of competing, conflicting, or even incommensurable epistemological frameworks as well as an outlook on current and future language policy will conclude part two.

Teachers of languages, as well as educators in general and employers, increasingly recognise the importance of developing intercultural capability. This recognition, however, brings the question of how this is evidenced as an outcome of learning. The assessment of this capability poses a range of theoretical and practical challenges. I begin with a description of languages learning within an intercultural orientation and a model for understanding assessment. I then discuss issues of conceptualising and defining the construct, as integral to the process of assessment. Next, I consider issues in eliciting intercultural capability in a proposed framework that includes assessment as both communicative performance (elicited in ‘critical moments’) and meta-awareness (elicited in commentaries). To conclude, I discuss issues related to identifying and judging evidence of the development of the intercultural capability and warranting the inferences made about students' developing understanding. The discussion is based on the experience of ongoing studies investigating the assessment of the intercultural capability in learning languages and in international education.

This article begins with an overview and problematization of the term community through a brief assessment of its history, diverse uses, core attributes, heterogeneous elements, and collocational companions. Following this, I describe demographics and processes associated with collective engagement in digitally mediated environments. Utilizing select alternatives to the term ‘community’ and incorporating the cultural-historical notions of mediation and activity, I then present research describing exogenous influences affecting educational uses of technology in L2 settings, the use of instant messaging and blogging for out-of-class FL interaction at the secondary school level, and a pedagogically focused example of a remixing text posted to an online fan fiction website. I conclude by proposing bridging activities as an approach for connecting the emergent logics of digital vernaculars with the analytics of formal schooling.

Academic writing and education in foreign and second languages both have lengthy histories. Their histories have diverged but also intersected. Matsuda (2005), for example, described the convergence in policies that led to a distinctive discipline of ‘L2 writing’ in higher education in the U.S.A. during the latter part of the 20th century. Assessment is a key point of their mutual intersection. Approaches to language testing that involve writing for academic purposes – or conversely, writing assessments that involve second or foreign languages – have appeared at certain times, supported by particular policies, rationales, and modes of inquiry or reasoning. The present timeline focuses on the development and elaboration of these rationales and research about them.

The present paper reports on an approximate replication of Foster's (1998) study on the negotiation of meaning. Foster investigated the interactional adjustments produced by L2 English learners working on different types of language learning tasks in a classroom setting. The replication study duplicates the methods of data collection and data analysis of the original study, but alters the target language (L2 German) and adds a stimulated recall methodology. The results of the replication study partially confirm Foster's results, and introduce some further differentiated findings. It is concluded that the original study's concern with the transferability of laboratory findings to classroom settings should be investigated in greater detail.

The aim of the one-day symposium was to bring together scholars in applied linguistics with an interest in the African languages for the launch of the new AILA Africa regional network. Contributions were in the form of invited research papers from several African countries. This report focuses on the South African contribution, which highlighted current research into the use and development of the African languages for academic purposes in response to the South African National Language Education Policy (South Africa, DoE 2002) with its focus on the development of multilingualism in the country.