This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, October 7, Sunday, October 8, Saturday, October 14 and Sunday, October 15 from 10:00 to 13:00 (JST). Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 14:00 on Saturday, October 7.

The pre sign-up (or course registration for those who are taking this seminar for credit) is required for anybody attending the public session on October 7 from 10:00 to 13:00. The sign-up process must be completed through "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, October 6 at 12:00. The public session Zoom link will be provided to those people who completed the online sign-up (or course registration) process by 18:00 on Friday, October 6.

In the field of language assessment, various frameworks have been in use for investigations into the validity of language assessments. While many applications of such frameworks have dealt with large-scale high-stakes assessment contexts, conscious attempts have been made by language assessment researchers over the last few decades to make them also applicable to classroom-based language assessment. Using such frameworks would allow practitioners to systematically evaluate the extent to which the use of language assessments is functioning as an aid to promote learning in the L2 classroom.

The aim of this seminar is to familiarize participants with a major framework of language assessment validation currently in use, the Assessment Use Argument (AUA) proposed by Bachman and Palmer (2010) and Bachman and Damböck (2018). In the first part of this seminar, participants will learn about the historical development of assessment validation frameworks and classroom-based assessment principles, with a particular focus on important developments in this area of L2 assessment research over the last two decades. In the second part, they will be introduced to key principles of AUA. An application of AUA to formative assessment of summary writing skills in a university-level academic writing course in Japan will be used as a running example. Finally, in the third part, participants will apply the AUA framework to developing assessment specifications and sample assessment tasks for classroom use as the final project.