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International Language Testing Association
Advancing Language Testing Research Through Research SynthesisDr. Sathena Chan, Associate Professor of Language Testing, University of BedfordshireTime: 10:00–11:10 AM (London) | 5:00–6:10 PM (Beijing), 5/9/2025 (Friday) | Time Zone ConverterThis talk explores the role of research synthesis (RS) in advancing language testing research, highlighting its potential to consolidate findings across language testing studies and to direct future research in the field. Research synthesis, when conducted properly with a systematic framework with rigorous selection and evaluative criteria, provides valuable evidence-based synthesis of findings and methods to help researchers minimise the risk of “research waste” (Isaacs & Chalmers, 2023) and to inform decisions to more efficient use of resources. RS also has a role in providing enhanced accessibility of the main developments of language testing to a wider range of practitioner audiences. The speaker will introduce main types of RS (Plonsky, 2024) and share a recently developed tool SMART (Chong, 2025) which highlights important considerations when conducting RS in applied linguistics. The speaker will also discuss some directions for RS in language testing.Sathena Chan is Associate Professor of Language Testing at CRELLA, University of Bedfordshire. She has been the recipient of over 35 research grants and consultancy project commissions. Her research can be seen in peer-reviewed journals, chapters in edited volumes and two books published by Cambridge University Press. She is the founding and co-editor-in-chief of Research Synthesis in Applied Linguistics.
