Behind The Test
Behind the Test, by Fiona Aish and Jo Tomlinson, is a podcast for ELT teachers, test writers, materials developers, and anyone interested in language assessment. Language testing is a huge field of study, and once you start scratching the surface, it’s easy to find it daunting. Behind the Test gives you a first look at this complex field, breaking themes and issues down and drawing on our experience to connect them to real world contexts. We don’t have all the answers — spoiler: no one does — but we think testing is worth talking about. Get in touch: test@target-english.eu
Episodes
In this episode, Jo and Fiona discuss practical tools for test writers — from corpora and learner dictionaries to readability analysers and AI — and how they can help investigate language, judge levels, and generate test material.
The key message: use them to support your decisions, not to make them for you.
Jo and Fiona explore what makes a language test useful using Bachman and Palmer’s six qualities: reliability, validity, authenticity, interactiveness, impact, and practicality. They explain each quality in plain terms and show how improving one aspect can affect others.
The hosts discuss practical trade-offs with examples and emphasise that the right test isn't a 'perfect test' but one that's balanced for its intended purpose...
In this episode, Jo and Fiona discuss how listening practice tests can be used effectively by focusing on three things: ensuring test quality, diagnosing learners' strengths and weaknesses, and turning results into targeted learning.
Practical tips include checking scripts, analysing answers, involving learners in review, and using tests to track progress.
In this episode Jo and Fiona define washback and explore how tests influence teaching, learning, and wider stakeholders. They discuss positive effects like increased motivation and clear progression pathways, negative impacts such as narrow teaching to the test and missed skills, and the 'ugly' consequences including high pressure, lack of control, and test anxiety.
Hosts Jo and Fiona discuss writing effective grammar and vocabulary questions for language tests. They focus on three practical principles—keep it simple, plan your coverage, and target exactly what you want to test—using examples along the way.
They discuss what can go wrong when writing items and how to avoid some common pitfalls.
This episode explains how to make assessment criteria work in practice by getting markers to share a clear, operational understanding. Jo and Fiona outline three stages—justify (explain the purpose), exemplify (show real examples), and standardise (maintain consistency)—and why each is essential.
They stress that reliable marking is an ongoing, collaborative process that reduces bias and protects candidate fairness, wit...
Hosts Jo and Fiona explore decision-making processes behind adopting established large-scale high-stakes tests or developing a local assessment, highlighting practical considerations and common misconceptions.
The look at the choice through three lenses — resources, ownership, and fit. Along the way, they challenge the idea that one option is inherently better than the other, exploring the trade-offs involved and how to make ...
Hosts Jo and Fiona explore what the CEFR C2 level truly means for language users, testing and teaching. They break C2 down into three core ideas — control, appropriacy and precision — and explain how these show up in smooth, context-aware speaking and writing.
The episode contrasts effortless communication with over-complex language, discusses acceptable errors and repair, and highlights how precise vocabulary, collocat...
Hosts Jo and Fiona from Target English introduce Behind the Test, a new podcast about language testing. In this introduction, they explain who they are, why they’ve started the podcast and what you can expect from the series. Drawing on their experience as item writers, assessment designers, teacher trainers and exam prep authors, they set out to make this field accessible to teachers, test creators and anyone interested in l...
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