School of Foreign Languages and Cultures

Research Center of Language, Cognition & Language Application

Brief Introduction to Professor Cheng Liying:

Liying Cheng (程李颖), Ph.D. is Professor and Director of the Assessment and Evaluation Group (AEG) at the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. Her primary research interests are the impact of large-scale testing on instruction, the relationships between assessment and instruction, and the academic and professional acculturation of international and new immigrant students, workers, and professionals to Canada. She conducts the majority of her research within the context of teaching and learning English as a second/foreign language (including immersion and bilingual contexts). Since 2000, she has obtained research funding totalling more than one million Canadian dollars. In addition, she has conducted 150 conference presentations and has more than 100 publications in top-tier journals including Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, Assessment in Education, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, and 《现代外语》. Her recent books are Language Classroom Assessment (single-authored, TESOL English Language Teacher Development Series, 2013); English Language Assessment and the Chinese Learner (co-edited with A. Curtis, Taylor & Francis, 2010); Language Testing Reconsidered (co-edited with J. Fox et. al., University of Ottawa Press, 2007); Changing Language Teaching through Language Testing (single-authored, Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Washback in Language Testing: Research Contexts and Methods (co-edited with Y. Watanabe with A, Curtis, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004).

This classroom assessment series consists of four interactive workshops. The goal of this series is to support you as a teacher to conduct day-to-day classroom tasks. Attending this series requires you to participate and conduct classroom tasks. Assessment of student learning is unquestionably one of the teacher’s most demanding, complex and important tasks. This workshop series involve teachers with hands-on activities in understanding major components of classroom assessment, discussing models of learning, and exploring their methods and procedures in relation to their purposes of assessment. In addition, teachers will learn how to provide feedback and major issues in grading.

This workshop will help you to reach two learning goals: 1) understanding major components of classroom assessment, and 2) discussing learning and learning targets to match with assessment.

This workshop will help you to learn to design assessment tasks to explore methods, procedures, and purposes of assessment and evaluation.

This workshop will help you to understand major aspects in providing effective feedback.

This workshop will help you to understand the meaning and value of grading.

This seminar will work with lead teachers on how to go about designing various test papers, e.g., placement or achievement tests. It will also help teachers to understand the basics of test data analysis so teachers will know which item(s) can be kept based on what criteria. Hopefully this can help the teachers to build up their own test item banks.

This seminar will work with teachers on how to reexamine student sample writing in order to create rubrics for assessing writing.

This seminar will help teachers understand how to conduct effective research based on classroom teaching and data coming from classroom teaching.