Congratulations to Linguistics and English Language PhD students Raffaella Bottini and Camilo Ramos for each winning a presentation award at the Language Testing Forum 2021, and to Franz Holzknecht for winning an award at the Language Testing Research Colloquium 2021!

Raffaella Bottini won the Best Student Presentation Award, sponsored by Cambridge Assessment English, for her PhD-based talk on “Task effects on lexical complexity in L2 spoken exams: Evidence from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus”. Camilo Ramos’ talk on “What do we talk about when we talk about diagnostic language assessment? Conceptualisations and practices in EFL teacher education in Chile” was voted by the audience to be the best Three-minute Speed Presentation Poster, an award sponsored by Text Inspector.

Franz Holzknecht, who recently completed a PhD in Linguistics, was selected as joint-winner of the prestigious Robert Lado Memorial Award for best student presentation at the Language Testing Research Colloquium held over summer. The Language Testing Research Colloquium is the annual conference of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA). The Robert Lado Memorial Award is chosen each year by a committee, and presented on behalf of ILTA. In 2021, there were two winners of the award: Franz Holzknecht and Edward Getman (Teachers College, Columbia University). Franz’s paper was titled “Double play in listening assessment”, and investigated the effects of playing an aural text once versus twice in an English language listening test. Further information about Franz’s award and about his study is provided in the ILTA announcement.