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The author
Richard Cullen is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language Studies at Canterbury Christ Church College. He has worked for the British Council as an English Language Teaching Officer in teacher education on development projects in Egypt, Bangladesh, and Tanzania. He has also taught and trained teachers in Nepal and Greece. His professional interests include teacher and trainer-training, classroom discourse, phonology, and the teaching and learning of grammar.
E-mail:

H.Douglas Brown: Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Prentice Hall Regents, 1994

LANGUAGE TESTING
The principal theme running through this book has been the importance of theory building in teaching foreign languages. The assumption is that the best teacher is the teacher who devises classroom methods and techniques that derive from a comprehensive knowledge of the total process of language learning, of what is happening within the learner and within the teacher and in the interaction between the two. All of this knowledge, however, remains somewhat abstract in the mind of the teacher unless it can be empirically tested in the real world. It is one thing to have a thorough grasp of the principles of foreign language learning and teaching and another to creatively formulate specific hypotheses about language learning in particular contexts and to garner empirical support for those hypotheses.
That support can be gathered by means of careful measurement of the language competence of learners in given situations. That is, your theory of second language acquisition can be put into practice every day in the classroom, but you will never know how valid your theory is unless you systematically measure the success of your learners and consequently, your theory-in-practice. It is to that end that this chapter takes up general considerations, of what it is that you, the teacher, need to know about language testing.