Professional Documents
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Current Issues in English Language-Teacher Based Assessment
Current Issues in English Language-Teacher Based Assessment
(TESOL)
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Current Issues in English Language
Teacher-Based Assessment
CHRIS DAVISON
University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia
CONSTANT LEUNG
Kings College London
London, England
Teacher-based assessment
number of educational (TBA) is policy-supported
systems internationally, including Australia, practice in a
New Zealand,1 Canada, and the United Kingdom (e.g., Cumming &
Maxwell, 2004; Learning and Teaching Scotland, 20062; Queensland
Studies Authority, 2009b; Saskatchewan Learning, 1993; Spencer, 2005).
It is increasingly being adopted as national educational policy in Asia
1 In Queensland where school-based assessment (SBA) was introduced in the 1970s (Sadler,
1989) teacher-based assessment is used for all assessment in the secondary school, even
for high-stakes purposes (see Queensland Studies Authority, 2009a). The Australian
Capital Territory (ACT) also uses only teacher-based assessment for senior secondary
level (Department of Education and Training, Education Policy and Planning Section
[Australia], n.d.). Other states such as New South Wales and Victoria have incorporated
large scale teacher-based assessment into their public examinations (see, e.g., New South
Wales Government, n.d.). New Zealand also has a long history of school-based assessment
in the senior secondary school (see New Zealand Qualifications Authority, n.d.), and has
developed a wide variety of teacher support material and associated research studies,
(Ministry of Education [New Zealand], 2009).
2 In Scotland much interesting work in TBA is being conducted by the Scottish Assessment
Is for Learning (AifL) group (Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2006) supported by the
Ministry of Education in Scotland and involving many classrooms.
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(Butler, this issue; Curriculum Development Institute [Hong Kong],
2002; Ministry of Education [Singapore], 2008; Xu 8c Liu, this issue) as
well as in some developing countries, including South Africa, Ghana, and
Zambia (Pryor & Akwesi, 1998; Pryor 8c Lubisi, 2002). It is also actively
promoted in the United States (e.g., Popham, 2008a, 2008b; Stiggins,
2008; Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2007), although always over
shadowed by national testing programs. At the same time, English lan
guage teachers are increasingly being called on to plan and implement
their own assessment instruments and procedures to monitor and evalu
ate student progress in their classrooms, and new curriculum documents
and professional teaching standards increasingly demand English
language teachers be knowledgeable and skilled in TBA (see, e.g.,
TESOL, 2005).
However, despite this widespread embrace of various forms of TBA in
school and adult education, there has been comparatively little specific
research into the TBA of English as a second or additional language. TBA
has been neglected by researchers partly because of the uncertain status
of TESOL as a discrete curriculum area in schools and tertiary institu
tions, partly because of the traditional dominance of the field by large
scale English language tests such as the Test of English as a Foreign
Language (TOEFL) and the International English Language Testing
System (IELTS) and their research priorities and needs, and partly
because of the ongoing critique of notions of standard English and mod
els of correctness as well as debates over native versus nonnative speaking
teachers and the implications for assessment.
What TBA research that has been done in TESOL reveals much vari
ability, a lack of systematic principles and procedures, and a dearth of
information as to the impact of TBA on learning and teaching. In
Australia, several studies of the use of large scale criterion-referenced
English as second language (ESL) assessment frameworks in schools
(Breen et al., 1997; Davison 8c Williams, 2002) have revealed a great diver
sity in teachers' approaches to assessment, influenced by the teachers'
prior experiences and professional development, the assessment frame
works and scales they used, and the reporting requirements placed on
them by schools and systems. Concerns have also been raised about, on
the one hand, the ad-hoc or impressionistic nature of many teacher judg
ments (Leung, 1999; Leung 8c Teasdale, 1997) and, on the other hand,
mechanistic criterion-based approaches to TBA, which are often imple
mented in such a way that they undermine rather than support teachers'
classroom-embedded assessment processes (Arkoudis 8c O'Loughlin,
2004; Black 8c Wiliam 1998; Carless, 2005; Davison, 2004; Leung, 2004a,
2004b).
Research into TBA in TESOL is further complicated by the consider
able uncertainty and disagreement around the concept of TBA itself and
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by its intrinsically co-constructed and context-dependent nature (Black &
Wiliam, 1998; Brookhart, 2003; McMillan, 2003; McNamara, 2001;
Stiggins, 2001 ). When the principles and procedures underlying TBA are
not clear, the basis for research and development is even muddier, hence
the need for more public and mainstream discussion of the issues. This
review article aims, first, to define more clearly the concept of TBA in
English language teaching and second to explore some of the key con
ceptual issues and challenges for the field, as well as the implications for
practice. The article concludes with a summary of some of the areas in
which more research into TBA is needed.
DEFINING TBA
There is no widely accepted common definition of teacher-based assess
ment in the English language teaching field, with many terms used
interchangeably to refer to the same practices and procedures, includ
ing terms such as alternative assessment, classroom and/or school-based
assessment, formative assessment, and more recently, assessment for learning.
Such terms highlight different aspects of the assessment process, but
all tend to be used to signify a more teacher-mediated, context-based,
classroom-embedded assessment practice, explicitly or implicitly
defined in opposition to traditional externally set and assessed large
scale formal examinations used primarily for selection and/or account
ability purposes. Thus, for the purposes of this article we take TBA to
mean much more than just who is doing the assessing; TBA also has
implications for the what, where, how and most importantly, the why of
assessment.
TBA has a number of important characteristics which distinguish it
from other forms of assessment:
It involves the teacher from the beginning to the end: from planning
the assessment programme, through to identifying and/or develop
ing appropriate assessment tasks right through to making the assess
ment judgments.
It allows for the collection of a number of samples of student work
over a period of time, using a variety of different tasks and
activities.
It can be adapted and modified by the teacher to match the teaching
and learning goals of the particular class and students being
assessed.
It is carried out in ordinary classrooms, not in a specialist assessment
centre or examination hall.
It is conducted by the students' own teacher, not a stranger.
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It involves students more actively in the assessment process, especially
if self and peer assessment is used in conjunction with teacher
assessment.
It opens up the possibility for teachers to support learner-led
enquiry.
It allows the teacher to give immediate and constructive feedback to
students.
It stimulates continuous evaluation and adjustment of the teaching
and learning programme.
It complements other forms of assessment, including external
examinations.
The key steps involved in such teacher-based assessment are captured
in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
A Framework for Teacher-Based Assessment (Davison, 2008)
PLAN
RECORD RECORD
integrate assessment with teaching and learning
identify long-term and short-term goals
establish standards and criteria
select appropriate assessment methods/
MAKE PROFESSIONAL
JUDGEMENTS
analyze aH assessment information RECORD
RECORD look for overall patterns
assess performance against learning goals/
criteria
check trustworthiness
formulate judgment
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Defined in this sense, TBA shares many of the characteristics of assess
ment for learning (AfL), a concept first used in the United Kingdom in
the late 1980s, and widely promoted through the work of the Assessment
Reform Group (Assessment Reform Group, 1999, 2001; Black & Wiliam,
1998). The term was introduced to ensure "a clear distinction be made
between assessment of learning for the purposes of grading and report
ing, which has its own well-established procedures, and assessment for
learning, which calls for different priorities, new procedures and a new
commitment" (Assessment Reform Group, 1999, p. 2). The Assessment
Reform Group (1999, p. 7) has described AfL's defining characteristics
as follows:
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should also be used for formative purposes, that is, to improve learning
and teaching, thus building a more coherent and stronger assessment for
learning culture. Kennedy et al. propose that in this more inclusive model
of assessment:
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lesson; the student also has to understand what they have learned and
what they need to learn next (Black, 2001; Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, &
Wiliam, 2003a, 2003b; Black & Wiliam, 1998). The learner's role is cru
cial because it is the learner who does the learning. This point seems
obvious, even trite, but it is central to the ML philosophy and, if treated
seriously, clearly highlights where formative assessment can go wrong. As
Torrance (1993) argued some years ago, many teachers are at risk of
assuming formative assessment is at best "fairly mechanical and behav
iouristic ... in the graded test tradition"; at worst summative, "taking
snapshots of where the children have 'got to', rather than where they
might be going next" (p. 340).
Teachers coming from more traditional assessment cultures make two
common misinterpretations of formative assessment. First, there is a
widespread assumption that any continuous assessment is by definition
formative, but this is not necessarily the case?a series of weekly tests are
continuous, but they are not formative if they are not used by students to
improve their learning:
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followed by formative self and peer
set at beginning of unit of learning evaluation and extensive teacher
students performance on
A distinctive stage at the end Formal portfolio/project/
system-wide published
feedback
NA
reflections/learning logs
language samples using
TABLE 1
checklists/self andreflections/learning
peer evaluations
and teaching cycle, i.e., part
relation to learner's starting process and student progress
during the course of the year
tests, student-developed tests
e.g., self,
An informal planned process tailored to the needs of the Peer conferencing; informal
More structured self, peer and Informal quizzes, diagnostic
planning for the future Analysis of drafts/video and
of effective teaching and
logs
Criterion referenced, but in Direct qualitative feedback,
elicit/check understanding;
informal part ofteacher's
every daily practice
opportunity for student
in student language use
process
NA
Types of assessments:
preplanning
Observe
Typical kinds Analysis
Definition Test
of feedback
Degree of
Focus
Inquiry
?o PiOr s
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assessment includes not only the formal planned moments when stu
dents undertake an assessment task but also the far more informal, even
spontaneous moments when teachers are monitoring student group
work and notice one student speaking more confidently or another fail
ing to take an offered turn. Because the goal of TBA is to improve stu
dent learning, self and peer assessment are an integral component of all
assessment activity. Feedback is also a defining element, with opportuni
ties for constructive and specific feedback related to specific assessment
criteria and curriculum goals and content regularly reviewed by students
and teachers.
Such an integrated approach to assessment underpinned the recent
development of a school-based assessment (SBA) component in the
Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE) in English
Language (Davison, 2007; Davison & Hamp-Lyons, 2009). The stated
purpose of the SBA component was to provide a more comprehensive
appraisal of Forms 4-5 (Grades 9-10) learners' achievement by assess
ing learning objectives which could not be easily assessed in public
examinations while at the same time enhancing teaching and learning.
The initiative marked a shift from traditional norm-referenced exter
nally set and assessed examinations toward a more student-centered
TBA system that drew its philosophical basis from the assessment for
learning movement discussed earlier. Teachers are involved at all stages
of the assessment cycle, from planning the assessment programme to
identifying and developing appropriate formative and summative
assessment activities right through to making the final judgments.
In-class formal and informal performance assessment of students'
authentic oral language skills using a range of tasks and guiding ques
tions and the use of teacher judgments of student performance using
common assessment criteria are innovative aspects of the new SBA, as
is the insistence that students play an active role in the assessment pro
cess and the vigorous promotion of self and/or peer assessment and
feedback (for a fuller discussion, see Davison, 2007; Davison & Hamp
Lyons, 2009).
Such TBA is assumed to have a number of advantages over external
examinations, especially in assessing language, because effective lan
guage development requires not just knowledge but skill and application
in a wide range of situations and modes of communication. Hence, like
other performance-based subjects such as music, art, drama, and various
vocational subjects, it is often argued that languages are better assessed
through more authentic-like, performance-based assessments. Table 2
summarizes some of the common advantages attributed to TBA com
pared with external examinations.
However, a number of these claims made for the efficacy, or even supe
riority, of TBA over traditional assessments, especially those relating to
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TABLE 2
Advantages of TBA Compared With External Examinations for Oral Language Assessment
(Adapted From SBA Consultancy Team, 2005)
Characteristics of
classroom-based TBA Characteristics of exams
(Continued)
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TABLE 2 (Continued)
Characteristics of
classroom-based TBA Characteristics of exams
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A problem with methods of alternative assessment, however, lies with
their validity and reliability: Tasks are often not tried out to see whether
they produce the desired linguistic information; marking criteria are not
investigated to see whether they 'work*; and raters are often not trained to
give consistent marks, (p, 152)
4 See Chapelle (1999), for a more detailed discussion of current debates over validity in lan
guage testing.
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classmate (s). Students are assessed according to a set of assessment crite
ria consisting of a set of descriptors at each of six levels across four
domains: (a) pronunciation and delivery, (b) communication strategies,
(c) vocabulary and language patterns, and (d) ideas and organization.
Teachers are encouraged to video or audio record a range of student
assessments to assist with standardization and feedback, involving the stu
dents as much as possible. During the class assessments, which might
span a number of weeks, individual teachers at the same level are encour
aged to meet informally to compare their assessments and make adjust
ments to their own scores as necessary. Such informal interactions give
teachers the opportunity to share opinions on how to score performances
and interpret the assessment criteria.
Near the end of the school year, all the English teachers at each level
hold a formal meeting, chaired by a coordinator in each school, to review
performance samples and standardize scores. Such meetings are critical
for developing consistency in and between teacher-assessors, for public
accountability, and for professional collaboration and support. At the end
of each year, a district-level meeting is held for professional sharing and
further standardization. Each coordinator is encouraged to share a range
of typical and atypical individual assessment records (along with the video
or audio recordings) and the class records. Once any necessary changes
are made, the performance samples are archived and the scores are sub
mitted to the HKEAA for review. Maintaining notes of all standardization
meetings and any follow up action is also encouraged so schools can show
parents and the public that it has applied the assessment procedures con
sistently and fairly. The HKEAA then undertakes a process of statistical
moderation5 to ensure the comparability of scores across the whole Hong
Kong school system. This TBA system is supported by a comprehensive
teacher training package (SBA Consultancy Team, 2005) which includes
an introductory DVD and booklet, and two training CD-ROMs contain
ing a range of student samples for benchmarking purposes. In addition,
39 district-level group coordinators, mostly serving teachers, were used to
coordinate training and standardization sessions with school coordina
tors and with the teachers involved within each school. A 12-hour supple
mentary professional development program with comprehensive course
and video notes on DVD (SBA Consultancy Team, 2007) was also devel
oped, and all teachers are encouraged to complete the program in their
first year of such assessment. Careful monitoring of the assessment pro
cess shows that teachers are able to reliably mark students' work with high
It is difficult to justify statistical moder ation from a theoretical perspective, given SBA and
the external examination are measuring different things under very different conditions,
but it is considered essential to ensure public confidence in the examination system is
maintained, while allowing the HKEAA to be more innovative in its assessment practices.
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levels of interrater reliability and that a higher correlation exists between
SBA and other components of the external exam than between the exter
nal oral exam and other components.
This TBA system aims to ensure, to paraphrase Clapham (2000), that
tasks are tried out, marking criteria do work, and raters are trained; how
ever, theoretical problems to do with the nature of what is assessed and
how it is assessed in English language education still arise and are, in fact,
foregrounded by TBA in ways which challenge the English language
teaching field. In the interests of brevity, we will look at three key sets of
issues arising from TBA which problematize our theorization of language,
language learning, and assessment.
It is rare in these communicative language teaching days for language use to be solely con
cerned with a display of linguistic knowledge (as in grammar drill exercises).
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However, as Widdowson (2001) noted, there is as yet no clear under
standing of how these different components relate to one another, par
ticularly in specific contexts. One consequence of this lack of
understanding is that assessment has a built-in arbitrariness; for example,
should pragmatic competence be regarded as being more important
than linguistic competence in classroom discussions? Do we need a
model(s) of language that would articulate the different component
competences in different contexts?
Second, insofar as language use almost always involves some content
meaning (even in formal language learning activities), then assessing
language means inevitably assessing content to some degree. This is par
ticularly the case for the TBA of English that takes place in a subject
learning contexts, for example, English language learners in mainstream
English-medium school and university classrooms (e.g., in North America,
Australia, and the United Kingdom as well as in English-medium institu
tions around the world), and in content-language integrated learning
programmes (increasingly popular in Europe where the teaching and
learning of English as a foreign language is carried out through a school
subject such as science). But assessing English in subject learning con
texts raises certain questions: Do teacher-assessors need a framework for
language assessment as well as a separate framework for content? Or can
they adopt a content-language integrated view, as argued by Mohan,
Leung, and Slater (in press), that proceeds on the assumption that there
is no separation between meaning and wording? These are critical ques
tions to do with validity highlighted by TBA, but they have widespread
significance in the English language teaching field.
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development; furthermore, such formative assessment seems to rely on
teacher intuition rather than any systematic theory of learning. In con
trast to most forms of teacher-based formative assessment, their preferred
model of assessment, dynamic assessment, works explicitly within a
Vygotskyan sociocultural paradigm, using the twin constructs of teacher
mediated assistance and the zone of proximal development to theorize
the process of learning through assessment. A similar approach grounded
in sociocultural theory, called interactive assessment (see SBA Consultancy
Team, 2008, for a fuller explanation), is also being promoted in the Hong
Kong assessment initiative. Teachers are given a framework of guiding
questions which make increasing cognitive and linguistic demands on
the learner, and their teacher-assessors are encouraged to interact indi
vidually with a student at any time, asking specific question (s) to clarify
and encourage the student to extend ideas, help prompt and scaffold the
students' oral interaction, probe the range and depth of their oral lan
guage skills, and verify the student's understanding of what he or she is
saying. The questions are meant to be used flexibly to ensure that stu
dents have the opportunity to show the full range of their responses,
hence achieving the most valid "true" judgment of students' ability.
However, such approaches raise key questions not only about the nature
of second language learning and its stages of development, but also about
the role of assessment criteria and the teacher-assessor. Where learners of
English need support to understand and express meaning, elements of
teaching and scaffolding of the medium of communication may be built
into formative guidance. How should this aspect of teacher-student inter
action be considered in any theorizing of TBA? How does a teacher decide
what to foreground in any set of assessment criteria and what to downplay
or even ignore? Do we need to adopt an explicit theory of interaction and
its relationship with learning? Is there something unique about TBA of
language that requires special and additional attention?
In a discussion on the development of a theory of formative assess
ment in general, Black and Wiliam (2009) suggest that theory building
"must bring into relationship ... three spheres, the teacher's agenda, the
internal world of each student, and the inter-subjective" (p. 26). TBA in
English language teaching highlights the complexity of these relation
ships and problematizes the teacher-assessor's own beliefs and construc
tions of their discipline (for a further discussion, see Leung, 2007) in
ways which challenge all in English language teaching.
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the theorization of assessment. It is a fundamental paradox of TBA that
its inherent strengths are viewed by many psychometricians as its great
est weaknesses. In many ways TBA is the opposite to traditional forms
of examination and testing in which context is regarded as an extrane
ous variable that must be controlled and neutralized and the assessor
as someone who must remain objective and uninvolved throughout the
whole assessment process (Davison, 2007). TBA, in contrast, derives a
major part of its validity and reliability from its location in the actual class
room where assessment activities are embedded in the regular curricu
lum and assessed by a teacher who is familiar with the student's work and
presumably has a stake in their improvement. To work effectively, how
ever, TBA needs a theory of assessment which is aligned with and which
exploits these inherent features. Thus, in the TBA initiative in Hong
Kong, schools and teachers were granted a large degree of trust and
autonomy in the design, implementation, and specific timing of assess
ment tasks. The criteria for evaluating reliability shifted from a focus on
input to a focus on output; that is, no assessment tasks are the same across
all schools; rather a standard set of expectations of students' language
use (i.e., assessment standards or criteria) were developed based on the
curriculum goals, past performances, and the teachers own judgments,
and are now used by all teachers?and more importantly, students?
to generate tasks appropriate to the students' language level, context,
and needs (SBA Consultancy team, 2005). All students are given suffi
cient time and support to demonstrate their best?to show what they
can do?and for the assessor to be able to confidently assess their out
put, but even more importantly, validate their informal judgments of
students' language levels and achievements. In other words, the more
formal assessment tasks are designed to encourage the teacher to stand
back and reflect on their implicit or explicit assumptions about individ
ual students' capacities, compare those assumptions with careful analy
sis of examples of students' actual performance, and then subject their
judgments to explicit scrutiny and challenge or confirmation by others.
This TBA initiative does not assume that the class teacher is objective
or has no preconceived ideas or assumptions about a student's level. To
the contrary, it seeks to make such assumptions explicit and open to dis
cussion with fellow teachers. Thus, it is not necessary to have complete
consensus; that is, teachers do not need to agree to give identical marks;
some variation within the range is to be expected. As Davison (2004)
argues, in TBA trustworthiness comes more from the process of express^
ing disagreements, justifying opinions, and so on than from absolute
agreement.
This theorization of assessment is obviously very different from that
associated with large-scale testing, one that has as core criteria for eval
uation not just learning outcomes, but the explicit enhancement of
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learning and teaching. As such, the traditional conceptions of validity
and reliability associated with the still-dominant psychometric tradition
of testing are themselves a potential threat to the development of the
necessarily highly contextualized and dialogic practices of TBA (Rea
Dickins, 2007). Given that TBA spans from in-class contingent formative
assessment as part of teaching to prescribed relative formal summa
tive assessment, the following questions need to be asked: How can we
develop a view of validity and reliability in terms of learning (not solely
in terms of learning outcomes)? Is there a place for differentiated cri
teria of validity and reliability for different kinds of TBA? How can we
further strengthen TBA and its nexus with learning and teaching while
at the same time enhancing community confidence in our assessment
systems? How can we better align traditional theorizations of assessment
with those needed for TBA and vice versa? Is such alignment theoretically
possible?
CONCLUSION
There are obviously areas of TBA other than those explored in this
article in which further research and conceptualization is needed. In par
ticular, more thinking is needed around ethics, trustworthiness, and fair
ness (e.g., see Lynch, 2001; Lynch & Shaw, 2005), and the relationship
between assessment, feedback, and learning. More research is also
needed into the effects of system-level change, including the impact on
teachers and learners of the adoption, implementation, or evaluation of
school-based TBA systems; the effect of importation of assessment
approaches from other cultures; comparative perspectives on assessment
policies and programs; and the impact of standards-based assessment on
teachers and students. More research into teacher training and profes
sional development in assessment is also necessary: what this kind of
teacher development comprises and how it is perceived, the quality and
progress indicators of TBA, and different approaches to teacher develop
ment in assessment.
However, TBA, in all its incarnations, has been around English lan
guage teaching long enough to demonstrate its powerful potential to
improve learning and teaching in a range of different contexts. What it
has lacked until recently has been sufficient engagement with theory and
a sense of a research agenda. Perhaps more tellingly, the highly contex
tualized and variable nature of TBA has meant it lacks the capacity to be
reduced to an off the shelf for-profit product and thus has always been
relegated to the status of the Other. However, as this special issue dem
onstrates, TBA appears to be gaining enough critical mass and common
interest to generate a new level of discussion about core concepts. This is
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to be applauded because many of the key questions and issues raised by
TBA are of central interest to the English language teaching world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors acknowledge the important contribution of discussions with their col
leagues at King's College, London, and the University of Hong Kong to the ideas
expressed in this article.
THEAUTHORS
Chris Davison is Professor of Education and Head of the School of Education at the
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Before going to Hong Kong, she
worked as a teacher educator for 15 years. She is also actively involved in the research
and development of English as a second language and languages other than English
policy and programs in Australia and the Asia-Pacific area.
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