Language Assessment and Testing Unit (LATU)
LATU’s mission is to further innovative language assessment and testing research in a multicultural and multimodal world in the digital age and to promote knowledge exchange and dissemination.
About
Welcome to LATU!
We are a new research unit withinthe Centre for Linguistics, Language Education and Acquisition Research (CLLEAR) at the University of Southampton. The PGR Special Interest Group in Language Testing and Assessment (SIGLTA) that has been running for 10 years is now part of our research unit.
Our vision is to provide a forum for knowledge generation, dissemination and exchange in language assessment and testing and to build new collaborations in this important applied linguistics field. Our research expertise covers the following areas:
- language performance assessment
- corpus-based approaches to language assessment
- writing assessment, assessing multimodality
- assessment in English-medium instruction
- standard setting, large-scale testing, comparative judgement
- testing validation and psychometrics
Language Testing Forum 2025
Join us in celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Language Testing Forum (LTF) and the 10th anniversary of the UK Association for Language Testing and Assessment (UKALTA) at this year’s conference!
People, projects and publications
People
Dr Duygu Candarli
Research interests
- Second language writing, writing assessment
- Corpus linguistics, learner corpora, phraseology
- Academic discourse, discourse analysis
Accepting applications from PhD students
Connect with Duygu
Miss Jingwen Wang
Connect with Jingwen
Ms Maishael Alsanad Mrs
Research interests
- L2 Writing Assessment
- Feedback Assessment
- Generative technology for Writing Assessment
Connect with Maishael
Dr Özgür Şahan PhD
Research interests
- Language performance assessment
- Second language writing
- English as a medium of instruction
Accepting applications from PhD students
Connect with Özgür
Dr Ying Zheng PhD
Research interests
- Psychometrics and test validation; Human scoring vs. machine scoring; Statistics in applied linguistics; Comparative Judgement in language testing
- Mandarin exams in the UK school system, including A-Level and GCSE exams; Mandarin Chinese teachers’ professional development
- Learner motivation and language teaching pedagogy; ESL/EFL learner characteristics and test performance
Accepting applications from PhD students