The last 20 years has seen an increase in assessment-related outputs at BALEAP events (Charles, 2022) – this is clearly a rich space for EAP scholarship. However, given the challenges to scholarship that EAP practitioners face (Davis, 2019) and generally lower-levels of confidence regarding assessment than teaching practices (Schmitt & Hamp-Lyons, 2015), there can be a reticence to undertake scholarship in this area. This ResTES event provides examples of scholarship related to EAP assessment and offers a forum for attendees to discuss their own work on testing, assessment, and feedback. There will be three brief talks, each lasting approximately 15 minutes, covering a range of topics: a course evaluation project that utilised assessor ratings to highlight areas of weakness within pre-sessional EAP materials; the development of an inter-institutional network to assist with the piloting of in-house EAP assessments; and the use of VLE data to conduct item analysis and improve the quality of test items. Following these talks, attendees will have the chance to reflect on how they might conduct similar projects and can discuss these ideas in small groups. This event focuses on utilising/repurposing data sets that many HE institutions already have, with the belief that approaching current practices afresh, with a critical eye, can lead to impactful, and crucially manageable, scholarship.
This ResTES is organised and led by TAFSIG.
Samuel Barclay is Senior Lecturer of TESOL at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He works in the areas of second language acquisition, EAP, and TESOL, with a focus on the acquisition of second language vocabulary knowledge. His other research interests include course design and language assessment.
Rob Playfair teaches EAP at the University of Liverpool and is the Co-Convenor of the Testing Assessment and Feedback SIG (TAFSIG).
Eddie Cowling is the Assessment Lead at IPC, University of York and is Special Projects Officer for TAFSIG. With Robert Playfair, he launched the TAFSIG piloting network last year and have recently conducted research on the motivations of the early users of this network.
Wayne Rimmer (EdD) is an EAP instructor at Manchester University. The motivation for this talk comes from his interest in learner analytics and data-driven learning.
The event will take place online via Zoom. This is a free event for members and carries a small fee of £10 for non-members. The capacity is 50, so registration is on a first come first served basis. The recording will be uploaded on the site in the next few weeks.
In order to get your ticket, choose one of the options below, for members or non-members. You may need to create an account if you haven’t used the website before. If you have questions, please email admin@baleap.org
Registration closes on March 21st March (MON) at 5pm GMT. We will email you a zoom link a day before the event.
