“Telling Our Story”: Reflections on the Place of Learning, Transparency, Responsibility and Collaboration in the Language Testing Narrative

Abstract

This article is based upon a presentation given at the Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) held in Denver, Colorado, in March 2009. That presentation reviewed some of the recent attempts from within our research community to “tell the story” of our field over several decades. It explored how the discourse of these narratives contributes to the construction of our identity in the present age and examined some of the images and metaphors we have used to help us make sense of our experience. The threads of learning, transparency, responsibility, and collaboration (which formed the subthemes for the LTRC 2009 conference) were traced to discern how they weave together into a complex and colourful tapestry that illustrates “our story”—a story that may help us better understand who we are as a discipline and community, what has shaped us in the past, and how we might evolve in the future.