Gary J. Ockey - Another Generation of Fundamental Considerations in Language Assessment: A Festschrift in Honor of Lyle F. Bachman

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

It is a pleasure for me to write the Forward to this Festschrift honoring Lyle F. Bachman, who has been my colleague and co-author since 1971 when our early academic career paths crossed in Bangkok, Thailand. Because Lyles academic career spans 50 years and spreads over a variety of domains, trying to do justice to the breadth and importance of his professional contributions is quite a challenge. Nevertheless, it is one I am happy to accept.

In this Forward, I will first provide a brief overview of Lyles career path. I follow this overview with a summary of the scope and impact of his scholarship. Finally, I provide a historical commentary on Lyle as an academic visionary by describing how his work has influenced me and the field of language testing.

Lyles university studies did not initially lead him in the direction of language testing. Lyle received his A.B. and M.A. degrees in English, and his Ph.D. degree in English Language from Indiana University in 1965, 1969, and 1971, respectively. His early teaching career began as a high school English as a Second Language teacher in the Peace Corps in the Republic of the Philippines. After completing his service in the Peace Corps, he returned to Indiana to work on his Ph.D. Although he began his doctoral studies in American literature, he fairly quickly gravitated to medieval English literature, and from there to linguistics and English linguistics. However, his teaching experience in the Philippines had kindled an interest in second language learning, and he conducted his dissertation research in Thailand studying the acquisition of English as a second language by Thai elementary and secondary school students. While in graduate school he also taught freshman literature and introduction to the English language. He then took his first academic position at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he taught introduction to language, modern English syntax, Old English, and sophomore literature.

Lyle has said on more than one occasion that he was more or less dropped into the field of language testing. In 1971, he accepted a position as Project Specialist in Psycholinguistics with The Ford Foundation in Bangkok, Thailand, where he worked on research and development projects for 5 years. His first assignment was to oversee the development and administration of language tests for placement and achievement at the Central Institute of English Language. (It was during this time that he and I first met and began what became a nearly 40-year-long collaboration in research and writing.) Lyles on-the-job learning about language testing led him to the library and to the discovery of works on language testing by Robert Lado and John B. Carroll, two scholars whose work in contrastive linguistics and psycholinguistics had informed his dissertation research. Lyle has said that he was fortunate to have been able to work on research projects with Carroll, and to have had an ongoing scholarly exchange with him over the years. He credits a great deal of the conceptualization in his book, Fundamental Considerationsin Language Testing (Bachman, 1990), to his interactions with Carroll. While in Thailand, he was also co-director of a 5-year longitudinal R&D project to implement an individualized language learning curriculum for Thai elementary school children. In order to conduct the ongoing monitoring and evaluation of this project, he learned how to use statistics, including multiple linear regression and factor analysis.

From 1976 to 1979, Lyle directed the University of Illinois TEFL Internship Program, in Tehran, Iran, where he supervised the graduate internship program, taught MA-level courses, supervised the development and implementation of an ESP reading syllabus and teaching materials, and oversaw budgeting and planning for the program. When he completed his assignment in Iran, he took a full-time position at the University of Ilinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) before moving on to assume the academic position he held at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) until his retirement in 2012. While a professor at UCLA, he served as Chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics for several years. He also held interim positions at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Jiaxing University in Jiaxang, China, and the Akademie fr Lehrerfortbildung und Personalfhrung in Dillingen, Germany.

Lyles scholarly work includes 41 journal articles and reviews, 32 chapters in books, 13 books, 15 research instruments and reports, and 139 presentations at conferences and meetings. The scope of his work spans several disciplines, including second language acquisition, language test validation, tests of communicative competence, theories of language performance, school-based language ability assessment, web-based language assessment, justifying the development and use of language assessments, and conceptual frameworks for developing and using classroom-based assessments. He supervised over 30 Ph.D. students (and numerous M.A. students) in language testing while at UIUC and UCLA. In addition, Lyle has directly influenced a wide variety of institutions through the 64 consultancies that he accepted in academic, educational, professional, and public domains in the United States and around the world. Lyle also served as Co-editor (with Charles Alderson) of