The President’s Message

Oryang Kwon, Ph. D (President, KELTA)

Welcome to KELTA!

As the president of KELTA, I extend my warmest welcome to you and thank you for your interest and concern with our organization. As you can see from the introduction of our association, KELTA has now ten years of history, which are characterized for dynamic and diverse activities of study and research.
The English language teaching and testing profession is now challenged with ever-growing demands for quality education and dependable assessment of English abilities. The general trend of language teaching and testing has been redirected to communicative language teaching and testing. Unlike the past practice that was mostly confined to the receptive skills of listening and reading, measured by the convenient multiple-choice items for objective and machine grading, the new, changing society demands the development of production skills such as speaking and writing. Therefore, language testers are now expected to be accountable for our subjective assessment of these production skills both theoretically and practically.

In an effort to materialize the assessment of production skills at the national level, the Korean government is now developing nationally accredited English abilities tests that would include all four skills of language. This movement is an epoch-making one, in that there has never been a national level English test that included all four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. We are proud that leaders of KELTA were involved in the initial stage of developing a prototype of the primary and secondary school level tests, with our expertise contributing to the advancement of the theory and practice of English language testing.

However, since there are not many English language testing specialists, we still need to put in more efforts to produce more testing specialists through our education at the university level and through workshops and seminars for English teachers. I believe and hope that KELTA should take initiatives in this endeavor. To this end, I sincerely invite you to join us with our efforts for the advancement and betterment of English testing in Korea and the world.

Thank you again for your interest in KELTA

Oryang Kwon, Ph. D.
Professor, Seoul National University

September, 2009.