ABSTRACT
The recent global health crisis (COVID-19) has had a profound impact on education at all levels, including language education. Thanks to the internet and the affordances of digital technology, although the pandemic continues to claim lives, education has survived and become digitalised in many contexts. Apart from the affordances and challenges of forced use of technology for language teaching and learning, one key consideration is how technology has impacted language assessment theoretically and methodologically, in addition to its implementation issues. While digital technology has entered the realm of large-scale and standardised language testing for nearly two decades, its recent prevalent use in ‘at-home’ remote, unsupervised educational testing was an unprecedented event which raises numerous questions about validity, reliability, fairness, ethics, security and other fundamental concepts in the context of technology assisted language assessment. This chapter is, accordingly, an introduction to the field of computer-assisted language assessment (CALA) or technology mediated language assessment (TMLA) and addresses they key issues challenging scholars in CALA/TMLA as it extends from small scale but high-stakes proficiency testing to larger scale but low-stakes achievement testing.
