Past, Present, and Future of Language Assessment: An Interview with Dr. Hossein Farhady

Abstract

Professor Hossein Farhady is an outstanding English Language Teaching (ELT) scholar in the field of applied linguistics, in general, and aspects of language testing and assessment, in particular with the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL). He has been teaching various courses on language testing and assessment, research methods, and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at MA and Ph.D. programs for the last four decades in Iran, the USA, Canada, Armenia, and Turkey. He has also been a prolific writer, publishing papers and books in prestigious international journals and publishing houses and presented numerous speeches and papers at national and international seminars and conferences. Moreover, he has supervised more than 80 MA theses and Ph.D. dissertations. His widely used book about research methodology for applied linguistics commonly known as “Hatch and Farhady” (1982) has served as the basic textbook at both undergraduate and graduate levels since the early 1980s. He has, additionally, been a curriculum developer and test developer in Iran and other parts of the world. He worked as a senior scholar and project manager for several organizations such as Ordinate and Lidget Green Corporations in California, Avant Assessment, and Second Language Testing, INC., in Rockville, Maryland. He has also received research grants and awards from organizations such as Pearson, Educational Testing Service (ETS), and International Language Testing Association (ILTA) in scoring and validating language tests. Currently, he is a faculty member at the English Language Teaching (ELT) Department at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey.