About us
History
Since its inception, the Language Testing Research Centre (LTRC) has carried out many major projects for institutions and government agencies throughout the world.
Established in 1990, the Language Testing Research Centre (LTRC) at the University of Melbourne has become an international leader in research and development in language assessment and language program evaluation.
‘The History of the LTRC: 1990-2020’ was written by former LTRC Directors Cathie Elder and Tim McNamara in November 2020. This documents the journey of the Centre, from establishment in 1990 through to recent times. Follow the link below to read this.
Clients have included:
- Educational Testing Service (Princeton, NJ)
- University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (Cambridge, UK)
- South East Asia Ministers of Education Organisation (Singapore),
- OECD (Paris); and
- Other agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Chile, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia
(L-R: Rohan Chandran, Kathryn Weller, Ivy Chen, Ute Knoch, Annemiek Huisman, Sally O'Hagan, Jason Fan)
Leadership
Centre leadership
Professor Ute Knoch
Professor Ute Knoch is the Director of the Language Testing Research Centre (LTRC) at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests are in the areas of assessing languages for academic and professional purposes, policy and language assessment, validation in language assessment, rater-mediated assessment and placement testing. Her recent books include Diagnostic Writing Assessment (2009, Peter Lang), Fairness, Justice and Language Assessment (2019, OUP, with Tim McNamara and Jason Fan), Assessing English for Professional Purposes: Language and the workplace (2020, Routledge, with Susy Macqueen; this book was awarded the ILTA/Sage best book published in language testing between 2017-2020), and Scoring second language spoken and written performances (2021, Continuum, with Jin Yan and Judith Fairbairn).
Ute was the Co-president of the Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australian and New Zealand (ALTAANZ) from 2015-2016, and currently serves as the Vice-President. She also served on the Executive Board of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) from 2011-2014 and 2017-2019. She has been the recipient of a number of awards. In 2014, Dr Knoch received the TOEFL Outstanding Young Scholar Award by the Educational Testing Service (Princeton, US); in 2016, Dr Knoch was awarded a Thomson Reuter Women in Research citation award, and in 2020 she was awarded the Language assessment advocacy award by the International Language Testing Association (with Tim McNamara and Cathie Elder) and the Reviewer of the Year award by the journal Language Testing.
Associate Professor Jason Fan
Associate Professor Jason Fan is Deputy Director and Principal Research Fellow at the Language Testing Research Centre (LTRC), University of Melbourne. His research interests include a) validity theory and validation of language assessments, b) Rasch measurement theory, and c) language assessment policy and practice. He is the author of The Development and Validation of Standards in Language Testing (Fudan University Press, 2018), the co-author (with Tim McNamara and Ute Knoch) of Fairness, Justice and Language Assessment (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the co-author (with Li Wang) of Working Towards a Proficiency Scale of Business English Writing: A Mixed-Methods Approach (Springer, 2021). Jason is the current 2nd Vice President of the Asian Association of Language Assessment (AALA) and a Member-at-Large of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA, 2020-2021). He serves on the editorial board of Language Testing, and is the co-editor (with John Read) of Studies in Language Assessment.
Past leaders
Past directors of the Centre include Emeritus Professor Alan Davies (Founding Director), Distinguished Professor Tim McNamara, Professor Liz Hamp-Lyons and Associate Professor Catherine Elder. All are internationally renowned for their scholarship and service in the field of language testing.