Dr Annie Brown joined the Australian Council for Educational Research in 2011 as a Principal Research Fellow in the Assessment and Reporting research program. Since joining ACER Annie has played a major role in the development of tests of English and Arabic for systemwide assessment of school students in the UAE. She has also designed and developed English tests for vocational and academic entry in Australia and overseas, and has undertaken assessment training and professional development workshops for test developers and teachers in India and Australia. Annie joined ACER with a specialist background in second language assessment. Prior to joining ACER, Annie was Associate Director, Assessment and Professional Development, in the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in the United Arab Emirates. There she was responsible for the design, development and administration of system-wide school exit and university entry examinations in English, Maths and Arabic, and also managed a professional development program for high school English teachers making the transition to standards-based teaching and learning. From 1990 to 2005 Annie was Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director in the Language Testing Research Centre (LTRC) at the University of Melbourne. During her time there she carried out and managed numerous test design and development projects for a wide range of language tests and assessment procedures for use in schools, universities, and professional and workplace contexts in a range of languages, including English, Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese and French. Annie has also been involved in a number of language and language assessment program evaluations, and has taught language assessment and language program evaluation courses at post-graduate level. Annie started her career teaching and managing ESL/EFL programs in the UK, Germany and Australia. Annie’s PhD won the Jacqueline A. Ross Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation research on Second/Foreign language testing, and was published as Interviewer Variability in Oral Proficiency Interviews (Peter Lang, 2005). She has undertaken numerous funded research projects, and was principal investigator of a TOEFL-funded study of rater behaviour and test-taker performance English for Academic Purposes speaking tasks, and of six IELTS-funded studies of examiner and candidate behaviour. She was a co-author of the Language Testing Dictionary (CUP, 1999) and has published widely on assessment in edited volumes and journals. Annie serves on the Editorial Boards of Language Testing (where she is also book reviews editor), Language Assessment Quarterly and Assessing Writing, and has previously served on the Executive Board and committees of the International Language Testing Association.
Articles (Refereed)
Assessing paired orals: Raters’ orientation to interaction (with A Ducasse), Language Testing (2009)
Assessed levels of second language speaking proficiency: How distinct? (with N Awashita, T McNamara, and S O'Hagan), Applied Linguistics (2008)
Self-assessment of writing in independent language learning programs: the value of annotated samples, Assessing Writing (2005)
'The devil is in the details’ : researching gender issues in language assessment (with T McNamara), TESOL Quarterly (2004)
Interviewer variation and the co-construction of speaking proficiency, Language Testing (2003)
Books
Interviewer Variability in Oral Proficiency Interviews (2009)
The assessment of speaking skills is an important part of the language learning process, whether...
Tasks and Criteria in Performance Assessment: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Language Testing Research Colloquium (2009)
This volume includes selected papers from the 28th Language Testing Research Colloquium, held at the...
An examination of rater orientations and test-taker performance on English for Academic Purposes speaking tasks (with N Iwashita and T McNamara) (2005)
This report documents two coordinated exploratory studies into the nature of oral English-foracademic- purposes (EAP)...