A Short History of LTRC

by Lyle F. Bachman and Adrian S. Palmer

1988 

Nearly ten years ago a relatively small group of applied linguists from several countries, with varied backgrounds and perspectives, braved the rigors of the New England winter and the vagaries of convention planning, which forced them to squeeze into a single hotel room for two days, in order to participate in a discussion of the issues and problems of language testing. For many who were at that first colloquium, it was both surprising and gratifying to find that there were others who shared their interest in this abstruse and relatively unpopular enterprise. Equally amazing was the discovery that not only did we share common professional interests, but we were in many other ways "kindred spirits". As Palmer, Groot and Trosper (1981) observed in their forward to the volume of papers that came out of that first colloquium, "the colloquium has enabled people with a common narrowly-defined interest to get to know each other and to develop the closeness and the lines of communication that allow each to profit more fully from the work of others" (p. vii). That observation is as true today as it was then. Indeed, it is this spirit of camaraderie, of personal closeness, based on mutual respect, that has nourished the spirited annual debates of professional issues and year-around communication among colleagues who are also friends that have become the hallmarks of the Language Testing Research Colloquium.

The past ten years have seen many developments in language testing, and the Colloquium, with its focus on research, has provided the sounding board for many of these. The use of confirmatory factor analysis as an approach to the construct validation of language tests was forged by the debate and collective effort among the participants at the first Colloquium. Research in oral testing has been a frequent topic at the Colloquium, and it is safe to say that many refinements in the measurement of oral ability have been influenced by discussions at colloquia. More recently, the applications of item-response theory and multidimensional scaling to language testing research have provided fodder for the Colloquium's cannon, and have emerged all the stronger and more promising in the process. Not all of these developments have been chronicled, but the four published volumes that have come out of the Colloquium (Palmer, Groot , Trosper 1981, Jones, DesBrisay & Paribakht 1985, Stansfield 1986, and Bailey, Dale & Clifford 1987) provide an overview of the issues that have captivated the field over the past ten years.

The first Colloquium came at a time when John Oller's research into the nature of language ability was redefining our view of language testing and at the same time raising questions that would lead to the emergence of language testing as a subfield of applied linguistics in its own right, with its own research questions, and with a research methodology that would contribute to other areas of applied linguistics. It also came at a time when Mike Canale and Merrill Swain were formulating the ideas that would emerge in their seminal paper on teaching and testing communicative competence. As a result of these cross-currents, it is not surprising that the focal points that emerged from the first Colloquium were an interest in a broader view of language proficiency as communicative competence, and a determination to embark on a program of empirical research into the then relatively unknown realm of construct validation .

The Colloquium has had a variety of themes over the years, and in some years has had no particular theme, other than a focus on research. We felt it was timely, in this tenth year of our persistence, to return to the theme of the first colloquium: the validation of tests of communicative language ability. Timely, because although "communicative" as a buzz-word has lost a certain amount of cachet in language teaching, it appears that language testers are beginning to come to grips with what the characteristics of "communicative" tests are. Thus, language testing may offer one avenue for investigating the nature of both communicative language use and the very abilities that make such use possible. One question we may ask ourselves, then, is, "How far have we really come in the past ten years toward understanding the language abilities that we profess to measure?"

We might also look at technological developments as an indication of our emergence as a field. In 1979, technical sophistication focused primarily on research design and the analysis of results-- Clifford's examination of multitrait-multimethod correlations and Engelskirchen, Cottrell and Oller's principal components analysis were "state-of-the-art". In the past four or five years, we have seen the increasing application of technology to test design and administration, and we now have at our disposal not only a wider range of analytic tools, but more powerful ones as well. Appropriate questions to ponder in this regard are, "How much have these technical advances contributed to our understanding of the fundamental issues of language testing?" and "Are we simply probing the same questions in greater detail, or are we asking new questions?"

While the tenth annual Colloquium is perhaps no more special than was the ninth or than will be the eleventh, we feel this is an occasion to celebrate the remarkable "staying power" of the Colloquium. As Stansfield (1986) noted in his introduction to the papers from the seventh Colloquium, we have no charter, no officers, no dues. Every year there are new faces and new perspectives which add to the fabric of our collective identity. The Colloquium endures in spite of our resistance to becoming formally organized. It thrives because of our common interest in and commitment to the field of language testing, and because we truly enjoy our work, especially bashing heads once a year. And we have fun together. After all, some of our best friends are language testers.

Charter, Officers and Dues: ILTA's Origin

ILTA began  in 1992 at LTRC in Vancouver. Charlie Stansfield was the first President and Charles Alderson the first elected President of ILTA in 1993. [More history to come.]