On behalf of the review committee for the UCLES/ILTA Lifetime Achievement Award (consisting of Sarah Briggs, Nick Saville, Carolyn Turner and myself) it is a great pleasure to announce that after carefully considering the several highly meritorious nominations received from the field, Professor Elana Shohamy has been selected to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award to be presented at the 32nd ILTA/LTRC meeting which will be held in Cambridge, UK in April 2010.

Over a long career, Elana has maintained her programme of empirical research, her insider critical critique of the basis of language assessment and her concern for understanding the interaction between language assessment and  language policy. After completing her PhD at the University of Minnesota in 1978, she soon started to raise questions about the nature and use of tests. It is particularly in this area that her influence has been most felt: her recognition of the power of tests, whether in education or in immigration, built the critical link between testing and language policy, showing language tests to be one of the most common instruments for enforcing language policy; her influence was the core of the growing emphasis on ethics.

In her career, she has built a number of significant tests and has made major contributions to the understanding of washback and other key research areas. The quality of her research and scholarship has built her a major place as a leader in the field, combining academic and professional activities. Furthermore, her example and teaching have built a generation of language testers who look to her as a leader. She is Professor of Language Education at Tel Aviv University but she has taught at a large number of universities in various parts of the world, was the research director at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, DC, and is affiliated with CALPER (Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education at Research) at the Pennsylvania State University.

She was one of the founders of an early national language testing group (ACROLT), chaired the AILA Commission on Language Testing and Evaluation, and served as President of ILTA in 1999. Apart from her own extensive list of publications, she has played a major role in editing, serving on the editorial boards of Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly and the Modern Language Journal and as founding co-editor of Language Policy.

Because of her many significant contributions over the years, the committee is pleased to announce that Professor Elana Shohamy has been selected to receive the 2010 UCLES/ILTA Lifetime Achievement Award.

J Charles Alderson

Chair, 2010 UCLES/ILTA Lifetime Achievement Award Committee