Ethical Considerations of Language Testing: A Theoretical Field Study  / Ghurmallah Abdullah Al-Ghantdi

Ethical issues are considered as basic requirements for the practice of any profession. Ethical considerations of language tests, that the various parties should be inVol.ved with, remained unwritten until recently, except for the basic considerations of designing and validating a particular test. Major publications on language testing, beginning perhaps with Vallete 1967 to Weir 1993 as well as other books written earlier, have not been touched upon this issue. Interest in the ethical considerations of language tests has increased immensely since the beginning of the millennium. The purpose of this research, therefore, is to write about these considerations with particular reference to language testing. The paper is organized as follows: The aim and methodology are first outlined. Then the problem of the research is discussed briefly. And because this research, solely, refers to references in English a section on the research terminologies was necessary. Then we talked about the research tools. An introduction of the topic was then presented. This part was followed by a review of the preliminary related literature. Cases of rests misuses were then presented. The code of ethics as it was written by ILTA were presented, then it was followed by a critical study. The results of the field work for each sample were presented and discussed separately. This was followed by an illustration of points of compatibility and differences between the two samples. The last part was the conclusion and recommendations.