About the Conference

Theme
The theme of the 2010 EALTA Conference was 'Collaboration in language testing and assessment'.
The EALTA Guidelines for Good Practice in Language Testing and Assessment stress the importance of collaboration between all parties involved in the process of developing instruments, activities and programmes for testing and assessment. In the Guidelines, collaboration is considered to be as important as validity and reliability, providing a crucial prerequisite for responsibility and respect for students, thereby contributing to fairness.

There is a long tradition in Europe of extensive and fruitful collaboration at all levels of the educational system, and language teaching and testing is a very good example of this. At the international level, the Council of Europe has been an exceptional promoter of co-operation in language education for a period of half a century. This has produced a variety of widely used tools, the best known of which are the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), the European Language Portfolio (ELP), and the Manual for relating language examinations to the CEFR. The European Union has also been a forum for such co-operation and has hosted a great variety of programmes and initiatives. All this has been further developed and promoted by the activities of the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) in Graz, Austria.
Enhancing collaboration at all levels, including the international level, is also one of the main aims of EALTA. Collaboration is necessary, not only between different contexts and fields – schools and universities, testing organizations and teachers, test developers and researchers, testers and testees. It is also crucial between colleagues with different specializations within the field of language testing and assessment, be they teachers in classrooms, teacher educators, policy makers, test developers or researchers – content specialists, item writers or psychometricians.