Report on International Language Assessment Conference in Armenia (ILACA)

July 1 – 4, 2009

ILTA Grant Award for Workshops & Meetings – Recipient and Conference Chair Hossein Farhady

Dear Carolyn,

I am writing to inform you in this formal report that the International Language Assessment Conference in Armenia took place July 1 to July 4.

One hundred and forty scholars from Armenia, Iran, Georgia, Hungary, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, US, and Israel participated in the conference. Although the details of the conference are on the ILACA site (www.aua.am/ilaca), I should further point out to you that there were two pre-conference workshops, three plenary speakers, four invited speakers, and 17 paper presentations. The workshops were by Dr. Purpura on “Assessing Grammar” and by Dr. Purya Baghaei on “Fundamentals of Rasch measurement”. Forty people participated in the grammar workshop and twenty in the Rasch measurement one. The plenary speakers were Dr. Spolsky, Dr. Purpura, and Dr. Bernstein who gave insightful lectures on Modernizing Language Assessment, New Ways of Assessing Grammar, and Automatic Scoring of Spoken Language, respectively.

The conference formally started with a welcoming address delivered by Dr. Lucig Danielian, the AUA provost, on July 2, and ended with closing ceremonies on July 4. Within the four days of the conference, the participants had the opportunity to listen to scholarly papers, discussion sessions, a panel discussion, and most interesting of all, socialize with assessment experts from different countries in two organized and a delightful concluding banquet at one of Yerevan’s most popular restaurants.

For most of the people attending the conference, it was a useful event. At the end of the conference a survey supported the organizers’ personal impressions with 92.5% of the participants rating the overall quality of the conference 5 out of 5.

With many thanks to ILTA and our other sponsors and the AUA staff, the Department of English Programs (DEP) at the American University of Armenia is proud of such a unique accomplishment for this region of the globe since it was not only a great academic event, but also a unique learning opportunity for the participants in general and the DEP students in particular.

Another point to mention is Dr. Purpura and Dr. Annie Brown’s introduction to ILTA. Their presentation was quite impressive, and we had 10 on the spot ILTA membership and we hope there will be more.

If you need any further and more detailed information or documents, please let me know. I am also attaching a few pictures for the ILTA site if you like.

Yours,

Hossein Farhady

photos from ILACA 2009