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Experience:
Professor Bachman's interests in language assessment, language acquisition, ESL/EFL and international programs stem from his service as a Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching high school English in the Philippines. His international experience also includes six years in Thailand as a Project Specialist for The Ford Foundation, where he directed intensive English programs, conducted research in the assessment of language proficiency, language aptitude and attitudes, directed a project for developing an individualized elementary school EFL curriculum, and served as a consultant to government agencies and institutions on language testing and language program development. He also spent three years at Tehran University in Iran developing an ESP reading curriculum, and two years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong developing an English language enhancement program. He has been a faculty member at the University of Hawaii, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Professor Bachman is a past president of the American Association for Applied
Linguistics and of the International Language Testing Association, was the first
winner of the TESOL/Newbury House Award for Outstanding Research, and has won
the Modern Language Association of America's Kenneth Mildenberger Award for
outstanding research publication twice. In 2004, he was awarded the prestigious
International Language Testing Association - University of Cambridge Local Examinations
Syndicate Lifetime Achievement Award. He has conducted numerous research projects
in the areas of language assessment, program design and evaluation, and language
acquisition, as well as practitioner training workshops in language assessment,
both at North American institutions and at institutions abroad. He serves as
a consultant in language assessment and language program design, evaluation
and research to government agencies and institutions in Hong Kong, Korea, the
United States, and the United Kingdom, and is currently co-editor of the Cambridge
University Press series, Language Assessment. His current professional
interests are split about equally among research, teaching, program development,
and training practitioners.
Research Interests:
Empirical (quantitative and qualitative ) studies into:
the nature of language ability
factors that affect performance on language assessments
relationships between individual learner characteristics and performance on language assessments
relationships between various types of strategies (e.g., learning, cognitive, metacognitive) and performance on language assessments
the processes that are engaged by language assessment tasks
applications of generalizability theory and item response theory to language tests
Languages: Thai: conversation, good; German: conversation and reading, fair; some familiarity with in Farsi, Tagalog and Cantonese.
