Standards in English Language Teaching and Assessment

Plenary Speaker:
Andy Curtis

Maintaining Standards through Professional Development in English Language Teaching

In this plenary talk, we will consider the notion of "standards" in its broadest sense in the sense of maintaining high standards of professionalism and performance in our English language teaching and learning. As professional development and testing and assessment are two, powerful ways of doing this, we will apply the notion of washback, the effects of language testing on language teaching and learning to professional development, to look at the effects of structured, systematic reflective practice on the effectiveness of English language teaching and learning.

Bio

Andy Curtis is the Director of the School of English at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. He has published 60 articles and papers, given more than 100 presentations in 20 countries and worked with language teachers and learners in Europe, Asia, North, South and Central America. In 2001, with Kathi Bailey and David Nunan, he published Pursuing Professional Development: The self as source (Thomson/Heinle), and in 2004, with editors Liying Cheng and Yoshinori Watanabe, he will publish Washback in Language Testing: Research contexts and methods (Lawrence Earlbaum).

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Photo by Tony Quirke