Chris Davison

• PhD
• Professor at UNSW Sydney

Assessment policy internationally places significant importance on the use of assessment criteria across all subject areas. However, in order to ensure effective use of criteria, it is critical for teachers to develop an in-depth understanding of them. This paper reports on a study of a range of Australian Science teachers’ views and uses of criter...

Hong Kong’s education system has been undergoing major assessment reforms since 2000, exemplified by the introduction of a school-based assessment component into the secondary school English language curriculum in 2005–2007, and its extension to the final 3 years of secondary school in 2007–2010. The challenge many teachers faced at the time of the...

School assessment systems in Anglophone countries typically reflect monolingual ‘native speaker’ norms of language and literacy development and fail to capture the distinct pathways and milestones of language minority students’ social and academic English language learning in the curriculum. Such systems limit teachers’ access to appropriate and us...

The role of school heads in any educational reform is undoubtedly one of the biggest factors that helps teachers achieve the intended outcomes (Stiggins & Duke, 2008). In the current assessment reform in Brunei's education sector, whilst most teachers have received significant training on the principles of sound assessment practices they struggle t...

Thirty years ago Australian researchers led the development of language and content integration in schools, advocating systematic teaching of language across the curriculum to meet the needs of English as an additional language (EAL) students. However, despite significant improvements in initial teacher education, targeted professional development...

In the area of task and learners’ agency, a crucial issue which has not received enough attention is how assessment tasks interact with agentic learners and how language learners negotiate tasks (Roebuck, 2000). This paper reports on a sociocultural study, examining how learners’ agency interacts with designed-in task components to construct learne...

The use of standards-based assessment (SBA) has gained prominence in higher education due to a wide range of research evidence that supports its effectiveness in improving learning and teaching. Although the concept is widely used in academic discourse and practice, it has multiple interpretations which have led to diverse assessment practices to t...

In Australia, increasing calls to strengthen the teaching of science in schools, stimulated by a need for higher levels of scientific understanding in the general community and also concerns about falling educational standards, have led to a concerted push to raise scientific literacy. Given the multicultural nature of Australia, government and edu...

Background The English language school-based assessment (SBA) component of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Examination is innovative in that the assessment tasks involve assessing English oral language skills in a high-stakes context but they are designed and implemented in the ESL classroom by school teachers in light of a reg...

This chapter is based on the material presented in a symposium at the 2016 Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics, covering four accounts of innovative assessment developments in different locations including Australia, Hong Kong (plus relevant subsequent research and development based in England), New Zealand, and the UK (Eng...

Secondary schools in Australia have long benefited from state policies aiming to increase the academic success of English language learners (ELLs). Complementary pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes have been implemented to raise the expertise of subject teachers who teach ELL students. However, subject teachers may not be recept...

for presentation at ALAA2016 conference.

This paper reports on a microanalysis of gestural behavior in classroom assessment situations. Videotaped excerpts of secondary school ESL students engaged in a peer group oral assessment task were transcribed to represent the gestures that occurred during the interaction. Using conversation analysis as a central tool for analysis, this study explo...

This study examines the production of topical talk in peer collaborative negotiation in an interactive assessment innovation context. The ability to stay on topic, to move from topic to topic and to introduce new topics appropriately is at the core of communicative competence. Applying conversation analysis (CA), we describe and analyze how one gro...

Teacher-based assessment (TBA) is increasingly being promoted in educational policies internationally, with English language teachers being called on to plan and/or implement appropriate assessment procedures to monitor and evaluate student progress in their own classrooms. However, there has been a lack of theorization of TBA in the English langua...

The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) has recently moved from norm-referenced to standards-referenced assessment, including the incorporation of a substantial school-based summative oral assessment component into the compulsory English language subject in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE). Starting in...

This article analyzes the development of programs using Putonghua (the official spoken language of the Peoples’ Republic of China) as the medium of instruction (MOI) in local and international Hong Kong schools. The article compares the complex and shifting reasons for the development of such programs, arguing that both global economic and social-i...

This chapter discusses the implications for assessment of changes in our conceptualization of English language learning. The chapter begins by proposing that different models of language and language learning result in very different perceptions of language learning goals and hence, different judgments of individual success and failure. This is exe...

In the English language teaching field, it seems self-evident that the goal of every ELT program must be to learn English, and hence the focus must be on teaching the English language. Although at some fundamental level such assumptions are undoubtedly valid, they have been severely tested by recent paradigm shifts in the field of second language a...

The purpose of research in the social sciences is to generate data that contribute to our understanding of social phenomena. In education, research provides information on multiple phenomena such as the efficacy of various instructional approaches, achievement differences between social groups and across countries, and the many factors that contrib...

Assessment and evaluation have always been important areas of policy and practice in ELT, inextricably linked with many other aspects of TESOL, including language policy, language teaching methodology and curriculum design, teacher development, and second language acquisition, to name just a few. Assessment and evaluation are common concerns in dif...

Throughout the relatively short history of second language acquisition research there has been a clear division, and sometimes tension, between cognitive and socially-oriented approaches. Cognitive approaches view learners as individuals who process language input and produce language output. The major challenge for the researcher is to discover wh...

Language teaching research and theory have traditionally focused on issues of effectiveness and efficiency: What is the best method for teaching a second or foreign language? What is the optimal age for starting the teaching of a new language? What emphasis should be placed on each of the “four language skills”—speaking, listening, reading, and wri...

It is obvious that English language teaching must have as its primary focus the development of the English language, as Cummins and Man point out in their chapter in this section of the handbook, but the ELT field has not yet reached a common shared understanding of what is meant by language. (The issue of what is English is even more contentious,...

This chapter outlines the background to policy and practice in relation to learners of English as an additional language in England. It examines the ways in which mainstream educational policy and practice has attempted to adapt in recognising that linguistic diversity is the norm rather than the exception in modern British society. Policy and prac...

This two-volume handbook provides a comprehensive examination of policy, practice, research, and theory related to English language teaching (ELT) in international contexts. Nearly 70 chapters highlight the research foundation for the best practices, frameworks for policy decisions, and areas of consensus and controversy in the teaching and develop...

Partnership and the integration of language and content teaching in English-medium schools have long been active areas of research and inquiry in applied linguistics and TESOL. However, most researchers have tended to focus on methods and techniques to use in the classroom or on the analysis of the linguistic demands of the content areas. Much less...

Subject English is a central feature of state-mandated curriculum in English-speaking contexts and a high-stakes barrier to be negotiated for successful graduation from secondary school, irrespective of language and cultural background. In an increasingly globalized world, subject English is also being reconstituted in new and unfamiliar contexts,...

A growing concern in teacher-based assessment, particularly in assessing English language development in high-stakes contexts, is our inadequate understanding of the means by which teachers make assessment decisions. This article adopts a sociocultural approach to report on the background and findings of a comparative study of ESL teachers’ assessm...

Drawing on a number of recent research studies, this article evaluates the process of implementation of a more student-centred task-oriented approach to English language teaching in Hong Kong primary schools. The reform, essentially a top-down system-level initiative strongly influenced by curriculum developments in the UK and Australia, called for...

Australia is a multilingual multicultural country with an impressive record of educational provision for students from language other than English (LOTE) backgrounds. The recent widespread development of common standards and benchmarks in English language and literacy in schools can be seen as a valuable component of this provision. However, care n...

Drawing on research conducted in Victorian schools in Australia, this article highlights the kinds of achievements that can be made by English-as-a-Second-Language learners that will not be recognized by the benchmarking of ESL students. Discusses the impact that policy decisions can have on individual students. (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse on ESL L...