Forty years of Language Testing,and the changing paths of publishing

Language Testing’s scope has drifted, but has also solidified

The largest change for Language Testing over the last 40 years has stemmed from the changes in the field of language assessment itself. The field strengthened and expanded into a rich subdiscipline that bridges educational measurement, social and cognitive psychology, and applied linguistics. Accordingly, the journal’s scope shifted over the decades from publishing work on the assessment of language writ large—including first language (L1) assessment and the assessment of “language disability” (Hughes & Porter, 1984, p. 1)—to publishing more squarely on foreign, second, and multi/trans/bilingual assessment (see https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/description/LTJ). We do not know exactly what sort of scope-change the field will have in the coming 40 years, but we do expect exponential growth in the importance of corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) on language test design and scale construction (rubrics). We also expect to see tremendous growth in the need for expertise in young-child second language (L2) assessment methodology and in methods for investigating the cognitive and affective processes involved in language assessment. The impacts of these currents in the field, which have already begun to flow strongly, will be exciting to witness as time goes on.

Language Testing’ limited medium of English is starting to be addressed

English has always been and remains Language Testing’s lingua franca, even though language testing researchers and users of language test scores, including policy makers, communicate and do their work in languages other than English. Language Testing’s English medium creates barriers to the scientific information it produces, and deprives the readership from learning about language testing issues that are important to large segments of the non-English speaking world. Language Testing and other journals in the applied linguistics field, including Language Assessment Quarterly, have recently begun accepting article abstracts in multiple languages, which is one step in the right direction. We like to imagine an amazing future wherein readers can toggle not just the language of the abstract, but the language of the entire article, with the click of a button. But until that is a reality, we strongly encourage Language Testing authors to post their abstracts in multiple languages, to create video abstracts which can be in any language (with or without subtitles or captions), and to write a one-page, Accessible Summary of their research for the Open Accessible Summaries in Language Studies (OASIS) database (https://oasis-database.org/), which can be written in any language.

Language Testing authors’ publishing pathways have expanded and diversified

It is simplistic to state that publishing and accessing research has changed in the last 40 years, but it has, and dramatically so. Back in the early days of the language assessment subdiscipline, journal articles were written in full and distributed to conference attendees at testing conferences before the conferences began (as reminisced by Douglas et al., 2015). At the conference, the papers were presented and discussed. The papers were revised post-conference, and then submitted for publication. Indeed, in the early days of Language Testing, the connections between the International Language Testing Association (ILTA), its conference, and the journal Language Testing were so strong that ILTA members received a 15% discount on Language Testing subscriptions (Douglas et al., 2015). Today, even if we cannot travel to conferences, we can post preprints (original submissions) of our Language Testing manuscripts to an open-access, public repository, such as the Open Science Framework (https://www.osf.io/preprints) or Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net/) and then obtain feedback on the preprints. For increased access to research, Language Testing authors can upload their postprints (accepted manuscript versions; see SAGE, n.d.), on their professional websites or profile pages that are hosted by their institutions. In fact, Language Testing encourages the publishing of preprints and postprints. No doubt, pre- and postprint sharing should be on every Language Testing author’s radar, and we as editors strongly encourage authors to take part.

As editors, we have carefully followed Open Science’s movements, ¹ which received a large push forward in 2003 when German research institutions signed the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 2003), which declared Open Access a publishing criteria for German researchers’ promotion and tenure. As explained by science reporters Vogel and Kupferschmidt (2017), Germany supported this initiative by flipping the way German universities and consortia pay publishers: Rather than subscribing to individual journals, publishers are paid an annual lump sum that covers German authors’ publication fees in exchange for German institutions’ full access to the publishers’ online content. In 2021, the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) organization established a policy that UK researchers’ articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022 must be published Open Access, and that most other forms of scholarship, including monographs and edited collections, will be subject to the same policy starting 1 January 2024 (UK Research and Innovation, 2022). Just this year, the United States declared that by 2025, all federally funded research in the United States must be Open Access upon publication (Marcum & Donohue, 2022) with Open (published) data required as well with no embargo. The Open-Science movement is thus having and will continue to have tremendous impact on the field of language assessment, as many of us will be required to publish our work and our data publicly.

Language Testing and SAGE are evolving to encompass Open Science. However, a fundamentally unanswered question worldwide is, who will or should pay for publishing in our evolving Open-Access publishing ecosystem? Is Germany’s system the way forward? Currently, many universities, consortia, or government bodies in the Western hemisphere are covering their corresponding-authors’ Open-Access publishing fees. Accordingly, Language Testing now allows author groups to change the corresponding author at any time before final acceptance so that authors can best take advantage of local publishing agreements. ² Language Testing’s editorials, Virtual Special Issue (VSI) editorials, and Test Reviews are already fully Open Access with no publication fee to authors. And as always, authors can choose to not incur fees, and their articles will still be published: we encourage these authors in particular to participate in pre- and postprinting. As we have discussed in this editorial before (Harding & Winke, 2022), Language Testing now accepts a larger variety of submission types, including Registered and Brief Reports, and authors are strongly encouraged to publish their data and materials in relation to all research article types for transparency, replication, and secondary-study use. It will be an exciting endeavor to see how our publishing paths will evolve over the next 40 years, but at the same time, there are concerns about how the changes will affect publishing opportunities and access to research in non-Western contexts and in the Global South. There are many unknowns. One thing is certain: Publishing will not resemble how it looks today. Researchers worldwide have their eyes on these important changes in publishing, and we hope that within language testing and assessment, these new pathways will expand access, equity, and quality.

In this issue and coming up in Volume 40

We are excited to report that this 40th anniversary issue contains seven Viewpoints and a Virtual Special Issue. For the Viewpoints, and with a nod to the journal’s 40th year, we asked seven language assessment scholars from around the world and at various stages within their language testing careers to reflect on key, future challenges and opportunities in language testing and assessment as they see them. The seven scholars include (in alphabetical order) Vahid Aryadoust, Tineke Brunfaut, Dylan Burton, April Ginther, John Read, Lynda Taylor, and Soo Jung Youn. We hope you enjoy reading these authors’ visionary pieces as much as we did. This year’s Virtual Special Issue was compiled by Yan Jin, and the introduction to it appears in this issue (Jin, 2023). Jin synthesized research from Language Testing to showcase how test takers can help guide language assessment policies and practices to ensure that tests are equitable, fair, and construct-relevant. Two special issues are currently being guest-edited for Language Testing. Later this year, we will publish Volume 40’s “Accommodations in language testing and assessment: Safeguarding equity, access and inclusion,” guest-edited by Lynda Taylor and Jayanti Banerjee. Volume 41’s special issue, guest-edited by Daniel R. Isbell and Benjamin Kremmel, will be on “Open Science in language testing and assessment.” We are excited about these timely works, and hope they will guide the field in its movements toward higher levels of operational fairness and research transparency.

We close by noting that Luke Harding, who had been co-editor of Language Testing since 2017, and the journal’s Test Review editor for 3 years prior to that, stepped down from his editor position at the end of 2022. We send him heartfelt gratitude for guiding the journal for so many years and wish him the best as he moves forward in his language testing work. Talia Isaccs has joined as the new co-editor, and will work alongside Paula Winke and the editorial team members Ruslan Surovov (Associate Editor), Ute Knoch (Test Reviews Editor), Benjamin Kremmel (Book Reviews Editor), and Dylan Burton (Editorial Assistant). We thank William Bonk, Miyuki Sasaki, and Elvis Wagner, who are rotating off the Editorial Board, for their many years of service, and we welcome Salomé Villa Larenas, Stuart McLean, and Stefanie Wind, who are starting on the Board this year.

On behalf of the entire editorial team, I wish you a happy, productive, and fulfilling 2023.