ABSTRACT
Language teachers and applied linguists are constantly engaged with language testing and assessment. This chapter focuses on generic practices can improve the quality of testing and assessment among all professionals who need to use language tests. Mislevy R. J. and Riconscente M. M. and Glenn Fulcher liken the process of building a test by following a design cycle to the work of an architect—;;a metaphor that has been adopted elsewhere. In high-stakes testing, when all iterations of the design process are complete, at least two full forms of the test are given to a large sample of participants drawn from the test-taking population. Prototyping generates two types of data for analysis: the responses to the task and the verbalization of how the participants responded to the task. Piloting is only undertaken when it is necessary to generate statistical data for a test by giving it to a much larger sample of participants who are representative of the test-taking population.
