Dear colleagues,
We hope you are doing great!
We are pleased to announce that the 27th Midwest Association of Language Testers Conference (MwALT 2026) will be hosted at the University of Iowa on October 10, 2026 (Saturday). Join us as we welcome MwALT back to Iowa City for the fifth time this October! Please circulate (and consider for yourselves, collaborators, and graduate students!).
This year’s MwALT conference is themed Language Assessment Through Multiple Lenses: Uses, Innovations, and Impacts, highlighting three interrelated dimensions of our field:
- Uses: the practical applications of language assessments in educational, professional, and social contexts.
- Innovations: emerging methodologies, technologies, and tools shaping language assessment.
- Impacts: the broad effects of language assessments on learners, educators, institutions, and society.
Our plenary speakers are Dr. Jamie L. Schissel (Professor of TESOL, University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Dr. Ping-Lin Chuang (Language Measurement Scientist, Duolingo). Their plenary talks are titled Humanizing Approaches for Language Assessment in the Age of GenAI: Peoples and Possibilities, and Technology as a Mediator of Language Assessment: From Construct Representation to Test-Taker Experience, respectively.
We warmly invite you to submit your proposals for paper presentations or roundtable discussions. Our submission portal will open from May 1, 2026, and proposals will be accepted until June 30, 2026. For more details about submission instructions and plenary presentations, please reference the enclosed CFP document and visit our conference website: https://education.uiowa.edu/mwalt2026.
Mark your calendar for October 10, 2026, and join us for an exciting event that promises to bring a fascinating line-up of presentations that will inspire and foster critical reflection and dialogue on best practices, ethical and social implications, and future directions in language assessment.
We are looking forward to your submissions. Questions and inquiries may be directed to MwALT-2026.
Sincerely,
MwALT 2026 Organizing Committee
Lia Plakans, Professor of Multilingual Education, University of Iowa
I-Chun Vera Hsiao, PhD Candidate in Multilingual Education, University of Iowa
Xinyue Shui, PhD Candidate in Multilingual Education, University of Iowa
Andy Jiahao Liu, PhD Student in Multilingual Education, University of Iowa
Kwangmin Lee, Assistant Professor of TESOL, Western Michigan University
Renka Ohta, Senior Research Project Manager, ETS
Ray J. T. Liao, Assistant Professor, National Taiwan Ocean University