Language assessment meeting 15
Series editors’ preface to Assessing Grammar Grammar, the structural glue, the “code” of language, is arguably at the heart of language use, whether this involves speaking, listening, readingor writing. Grammar has also been central to language teaching andassessment historically, from the Middle Ages, when “rhetoric” was a key component of a university education, to the “skills-and-components” models of the 1960s that informed both language pedagogy and languagetesting. Acknowledgments In the late 1990s when Lyle Bachman and Charles Alderson invited me to write a book on assessing grammar, the resurging interest in grammar in the field of applied linguistics had already been well underway, and I was delighted. I knew there was no other book on assessing grammatical ability, and I knew this would be a challenge. In the next five years, I worked continuously on this book and am deeply grateful that Lyle, Charles and Mickey Bonin, then of Cambridge University Press, never lost faith that