ABSTRACT
A little over 50 years ago, in the spring of 1961, a conference was held in Washington, DC, to discuss options for a new test of English for international students coming to study at American universities. As the delegates settled back in their chairs, John Carroll, a leading psychologist and linguist, began his opening address with the words: ‘Language testing has a long history, and much experience and wisdom have accumulated … [it] has reached such a stage of professionalization that a whole book on the subject is about to appear’ (Carroll, 1961, p. 313). Today, when we can point to the shelves of books on language assessment that appear each year as well as to university courses,
regular international conferences, academic journals and professional associations, and to numbers of test takers sometimes counted in millions rather than the thousands seen at that time, we can look back at the idea of a profession represented by as little as the promise of one ‘whole book’ with a wry smile. In fact, Carroll’s paper and the book he referred to are now widely seen as laying the foundations for the era of greater professionalism that was to follow.
