Our History

How did it all start?

LAALTA was born from the initiative by the LTRC 2017 organizing committee to set up a Latin American group that could initiate conversations about language assessment in Latin America. Thanks to the ILTA Collaboration and Outreach award the LTRC 2017 committee was granted, this was possible and the Latin American Association for Language Testing and Assessment (LAALTA) was founded in October of that year. LAALTA was founded by 11 volunteers who formed the first Organising Team from 2017 to 2019. In 2019, we held our first board elections. Seven academics from different parts of Latin America formed our first Executive Board, who were in office until 2021. In that year, we had our second elections, where the board was extended to 10 officers and three volunteers.

What happened afterwards?

Over the past six years, LAALTA board members have worked hard on establishing the association’s mission and vision and defining its identity. But most importantly, LAALTA has focused on facilitating a space for connecting language testing researchers and academics across Latin America. Our first event, organized in collaboration with TESOLChile in 2018, called “Connecting language teaching and language assessment: Laying the groundwork for language assessment in Latin America”, was held on November 16-17 at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Viña del Mar, Chile. The event in Chile gave us the opportunity not only to connect those professionals who are interested in language testing but to connect the language teaching and language testing worlds. The event, with the participation of around 200 language teachers and testers, was a springboard for these two worlds to engage in the construction of fluent conversations and common understanding around the topic. Moreover, there was also the initiative of developing language assessment literacy among the audience by means of workshops dedicated to connecting language testing practices to the language classroom. 

Due to this successful experience, the LAALTA board members decided that this is the approach we want to take for our future events. We have defined a longitudinal work in collaboration with language teaching associations in Latin America with the purpose of connecting the two disciplines (language teaching and assessment) and opening opportunities for networking and interdisciplinarity at the local level. This led us, in 2020, to pair up with FAAPI (Federación Argentina de Asociaciones de Profesores de Inglés, Argentine Federation of English Teaching Associations) in Argentina for the organization of an academic event that could help raise awareness of the importance of language assessment and language assessment literacy in the country. FAAPI is a well-established federation which has organized local language teaching conferences across Argentina since 1973. In the past, FAAPI events normally focused on ELT issues as well as EFL/ESL topics. This was the first time a FAAPI conference focused entirely on language assessment. The conference, called “First Latin American conference on language testing and assessment FAAPI 2020”, was planned for September 19-20, 2020. Unfortunately, the in-person conference had to be canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic and it was eventually held online on September 17-19, 2021 with around 850 online attendees. LAALTA was awarded the ILTA Collaboration and Outreach grant for this event.

What is LAALTA focusing on now?

We are now organizing our third event in Latin America. This time we have joined efforts with Universidad de Costa Rica for the first conference on language assessment of the country. The conference, “Integrating the global and the local: Current language teaching and language assessment practices in Latin America”, is planned for November 22-25, 2023 in San José, Costa Rica. 

LAALTA