About the Conference

Theme

The theme of the 2010 EALTA Conference is “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. We look forward to receiving many proposals that address the broad spectrum of the theme for this year’s conference once we send the call for proposals in October.

Important dates

November 01, 2009: Paper proposal submission starts
November 30, 2009: Paper proposal deadline
December 01, 2009: Registration/hotel booking starts
February 15, 2010: Presenters informed of acceptance/regrets to others
March 01, 2010: Provisional programme ready
May 01, 2010: Final deadline for registration

Pre-conference Workshops (25 – 27 May 2010)

The seventh EALTA conference will host two pre-conference workshops.
Workshop 1: Developing Listening Tasks by Rita Green
Workshop 2: Classical Test Theory by Norman Verhelst
You can download the application forms in the top right-hand corner of this page.

Workshop programmes

Details to be announced

Location

EALTA’s seventh annual conference will take place 27-30 May 2010 in the City of the Hague, the seat of the Dutch Government (Amsterdam being the capital of the Netherlands). Cito, the Dutch Institute for Educational Measurement, has the honour of hosting this event, using its experience in cooperation with experts in the field of testing and assessment from all over Europe and beyond. The venue is in situated on the beaches of the North Sea, not very far from the historic centre of the Hague, where the Dutch Nation grew into existence in the 16th century.