Language testing courses: What are they in 2007?

Abstract

In 1996, we published an article that investigated the characteristics of basic language testing courses in terms of the instructors, course characteristics, and students. The present study is designed to describe the same characteristics of basic language testing courses in 2007 and to examine how such courses have changed since 1996. To those ends, we used the same questionnaire that was used in 1996 with 20 new items added. The main topics of the questionnaire included the instructors' background, the topics covered in class, and the instructors' perceptions of students' general attitudes toward language testing at the beginning and end of the course. While most items were of the Likert-scale type, some were open-ended. In the first three months of 2007, email messages were sent out to the ltest-l and ilta-mem lists asking recipients to access a Survey Monkey website that contained our questionnaire and respond to it. A second emailing was sent out several weeks later to involve those who had not responded the first time. A total of 97 participants cooperated with usable data. The results describe the instructors, course characteristics, and students, as well as differences and similarities between the 1996 and 2007 results in quantitative and qualitative terms.