Professor Antony John Kunnan

Professor Antony John Kunnan (FAH) has been selected by the U.S. Department of State for a two-week English Language Specialist virtual project focusing on Language Assessment Development at the National Research University’s Higher School of Economics (Национальный исследовательский университет Высшая школа экономики), Department of Foreign Languages, in Moscow, Russia.

Professor Kunnan is part of a very selective group, as his project is one of the 130 that the English Language Specialist Program supports each year. Professor Kunnan is a specialist who has published widely on test development, evaluation, statistics, and ethics. He has authored and edited 11 books and written 75 journal articles and book chapters; he is also the Editor of two journals Language Assessment Quarterly and Journal of Asia TEFL. In addition, he has conducted workshops for teachers and professors of English in more than 35 countries from Argentina to Thailand. He is also the only Asian expert member of the Association of Language Testers of Europe for whom he has conducted workshops in Barcelona, Budapest, Cluj-Napoca, Prague, and Sofia. Previously, he was a Fulbright Professor at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan.

In this project, he will train professors and teachers in the use of advanced methods in language test development and research. The professors will be trained to use authentic university-type scenarios to assess language skills like listening, speaking, reading, and writing independently and in an integrated manner using materials from introductory text materials from economics and business texts. The professors will also learn to develop these summative tests on a technology platform so that their students can take the test online.

The English Language Specialist Program is the premier opportunity for leaders in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages to enact meaningful and sustainable changes in the way that English is taught abroad. The Program is administered by the Center for Intercultural Education and Development at Georgetown University.

For further information about the English Language Specialist Program, please visit elprograms.org/specialist.