2024 ILTA Election Results
Monday, November 18, 2024
ILTA Members, I am very happy to announce the winners of the 2024 ILTA officer elections:
Vice President: Lia Plakans
Members at Large: Bart Deygers, Kathrin Eberharter, Lianzhen He
Nominating Committee: Heidi Banerjee, Haeun Kim, John Read
Communications Committee Chair: Erik Voss
Please join us in congratulating the newly elected officers (their bios are provided below), who will officially start on January 1st, 2025.
We would like to extend our thanks to all the candidates for their willingness to stand for the positions and provide such an important service to the language testing community. Sincere thanks also go to the outgoing Nominating Committee, David Wei Dai (chair), Dylan Burton, Ivy Chen, and Daniel Isbell for their work in putting together an excellent slate.
Sincerely,
Elvis Wagner
ILTA Secretary
Lia Plakans
Lia Plakans is a professor of multilingual education. Her scholarship investigates reading and writing, teacher development, and the assessment of language/literacy. She currently serves as the Chair of the Department Teaching at the University of Iowa. She has directed multiple grants funded by the U.S. Department of Education ($6.5M) focused on professional learning for teachers to support culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Her research has been funded through a TOEFL Committee of Examiners grant and a Spaan Fellowship (University of Michigan). She has served as an Associate Editor for Language Assessment Quarterly and co-edits the annotated bibliographies in the Journal of Second Language Writing. Plakans has authored over 30 articles and two books. In 2017, she received the ILTA Best Paper Award for an article co-authored with Atta Gebril. Plakans was appointed to a National Academy of Science committee that co-authored a report commissioned by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. She has served on/chaired the TOEFL Committee of Examiners. Plakans was a member-at-large on the ILTA Board and president of the Midwest Association of Language Testers. Bart Deygers
Bart Deygers is assistant professor at Ghent University, Belgium. His language testing research and publications focus on fairness, justice and validity in the context of high-stakes testing, as well as on language testing policy. He has been an ILTA member since 2014 and has taken on different responsibilities within ILTA. He has served on the best article committee twice and is currently co-chairing the ILTA Code of Ethics revision process with Meg Malone. He won the J. Ross award (LTRC 2018), is co-author of the 2024 ILTA best article and is the main organizer of LTRC 2027. Kathrin Eberharter
Kathrin Eberharter attained her first MA at the University of Innsbruck, qualifying her to teach at Austrian secondary schools. During her final practical year, she started part-time work for the national exam-reform project at the University of Innsbruck. She then held project and research positions while completing her MA and PhD at Lancaster University.
Since 2022, Eberharter has held a Senior Lecturer position at the Department of Subject-Specific Education in Innsbruck where she focuses on pre-service teacher training and the Language Testing Research Group Innsbruck. In addition to being involved in research projects, Eberharter has also gathered first-hand experience around standardized language test development. Her research interests include the assessment of L2 productive skills, with a focus on task development, rating scale development and rater cognition. Eberharter has been an active member of ILTA by helping with the organisation of LTRC 2024 as well as serving on sub-committees and the executive board as a member-at-large (2023-2024).
Lianzhen He
Lianzhen He is a professor at Zhejiang University. Her main research interests are language testing and language teaching. She was a senior visiting scholar at UCLA in 2004 and local chair of LTRC 2008 held in Hangzhou, China. She has been on the editorial board of Language Assessment Quarterly since 2007 and served on the TOEFL COE from 2015 to 2020. She has also been a keynote speaker in many international conferences.
Lianzhen has directed more than 10 large-scale research projects on language testing and language teaching. She was a key member of the CSE (China Standards of English Language Ability) project and was on the steering committee for the linking studies of TOEFL, IELTS and Aptis to the CSE.
Lianzhen has published widely in applied linguistics and language testing, including five monographs and articles in Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, Assessing Writing, etc. She launched the Language Testing and Assessment journal in 2022.
Heidi Banerjee
Heidi Liu Banerjee is a psychometrician on the Qualification Assessments team at PSI Services LLC, where she works on language assessment for immigration purposes and high school equivalency credentialing. She earned her Ed.D in applied linguistics with a concentration on second language assessment from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests primarily revolve around scenario-based language assessment and learning-oriented assessment. She has frequently presented her work at LTRC and AAAL, with her latest publications appearing in Language Assessment Quarterly, Learning-oriented Language Assessment: Putting Theory into Practice (edited by Atta Gebril), and the Concise Companion to Language Assessment (edited by Antony Kunnan). Banerjee has been an ILTA member since 2012. She served on the organizing committee for the 2016 LTRC in Palermo, Italy and as a nominating committee member in 2021.
Haeun Kim
Haeun (Hannah) Kim is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the School of Languages and Linguistics. She completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics and Technology at Iowa State University, USA, with a minor in Statistics. Her research interests include multimodal language assessments for young learners, argument-based validation in testing, corpus linguistics, generative AI-assisted writing, and language learning in the digital wilds. Under the guidance of her PhD advisor, Professor Carol A. Chapelle, she completed her dissertation that focuses on the task complexity of picture-based narrative writing tasks in WIDA’s ACCESS for ELLs. In her free time, she enjoys watching performance videos of K-pop groups such as BTS. This passion has inspired her research on informal language learning in online fan communities, which was recently published in the CALICO Journal. She hopes to continue exploring the intersections of educational technology, language assessment, and second language acquisition. John Read
John Read is an emeritus professor in Applied Language Studies at the University of Auckland. He was a founding member of ILTA and has served the association in many roles over the years, notably as President in 2011 and 2012. He has been a frequent participant in LTRC and was chair of the organizing committee for the conference in Auckland in 2018. As a scholar, he is best known for his work on vocabulary assessment and the testing of English for academic and professional purposes. His authored books are Assessing vocabulary (Cambridge, 2000) and Assessing English proficiency for university study (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Currently, he is co-editor of the open access international journal published by ALTAANZ, Studies in Language Assessment. Erik Voss
Erik Voss is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City where he teaches courses on language & technology. His research interests include applications of artificial intelligence in applied linguistics, language assessment and technology, and language assessment validation research. Voss is Editor-in-Chief of NYS TESOL Journal and Associate Editor of Language Assessment Quarterly. He has served on the executive board for the International Language Testing Association (ILTA), has served as ILTA’s webmaster, and is the current chair of the ILTA Communications Committee. Voss organizes the annual Artificial Intelligence Research in Applied Linguistics (AIRiAL) conference at Teachers College.
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