Awards
Franz Holzknecht was awarded the best postgraduate student presentation award at the 2020 Language Testing Forum, an annual conference organised by the UK Association for Language Testing and Assessment. Franz presented findings from his PhD, which he completed at Lancaster University on "Double play in listening assessment", in a challenging 3-slide 3-minute presentation format. Franz' submission was selected for presentation from a large number of proposals alongside four other postgraduate student submissions, and was chosen as the best of the five presentations at the conference.
Carol Spöttl, intiator and former head of our Language Testing Research Group, is the deserved recipient of the 2018 British Council International Assessment Award. The award was presented to Carol at the most recent EALTA conference in Bochum. It is awarded annually to an "individual working for the promotion of excellence in language assessment on the international stage" to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of language testing through their career.
LTRGI member Benjamin Kremmel has secured financial support from EALTA to hold a series of workshops in Lithuania. In a competitive bid, the EALTA executive committee chose the proposal for a series of workshops to improve classroom-based language assessment of foreign languages in lower secondary schools in Lithuania jointly submitted by Benjamin Kremmel (LTRGI), Monique Yoder (LCC Klaipeda) and Laura Vilkaitė (University of Vilnius) as one of four recipients for EALTA event funding in 2017. The workshop series in scheduled to take place in four cities in the Baltic state in November 2017.
Benjamin Kremmel was nominated for the Lehre Plus! Teaching Award 2016 of the University of Innsbruck. The award is presented every two years to honour "excellent and innovative university teaching". Benjamin was nominated by the School of Education's Dean of Studies for his course "Vocabulary: Learning, Teaching, and Assessment" and his initiative to involve undergraduate students in research, which has already resulted in a publication. A report of the award ceremony can be found here (German only).
Benjamin Kremmel was awarded one of ten TOEFL® Small Grants for Doctoral Research in Second or Foreign Language Assessment. The grant will support his PhD research project at the University of Nottingham, UK, which looks into the development and validation of a computer-adaptive diagnostic vocabulary test. The grant (2,000 USD) is awarded every year by Educational Testing Service (ETS) to "promising doctoral students working in the area of foreign or second language assessment" to "help them finish their dissertations in a timely manner". Benjamin's PhD project was selected as one of only 10 awardees for the year 2015. Find out more about the grant here.
Benjamin Kremmel was awarded an APTIS Assessment Research Award to support his PhD research project at the University of Nottingham, UK. The APTIS Assessment Research Awards (£2,500) are sponsored annually by the British Council "to assist doctoral level research students (Ph.D/Ed.D.) in their data collection and/or analysis activities or in presenting their work at an international conference". Benjamin's PhD project of developing and validating a computer-adaptive diagnostic vocabulary test was selected as one of six awardees from a competitive international field of applicants. Find out more about the grant here.
Benjamin Kremmel was awarded the prize for "Best Poster Presentation" at the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Vocabulary Special Interest Group Conference 2015 in Swansea, UK, for the poster entitled "New approaches to vocabulary testing: Challenging assumptions" (co-presented with Beatriz González Fernández, University of Nottingham, UK).
The Language Testing Resarch Group Innsbruck (Carol Spöttl, Franz Holzknecht, Kathrin Eberharter, Benjamin Kremmel and Eva Konrad) was awarded one of the 2015 APTIS Assessment Research Grant by the British Council. The grant was awarded to support their proposed project "Looking into listening: Using eye-tracking to establish the cognitive validity of the Aptis Listening Test". The team will be using eye-tracking and stimulated recall methodology to investigate the cognitive processing of candidates while taking listening tests. For more information on the award, read our iPoint article (in German).
The 2015 Robert Lado Memorial Award was awarded by the International Language Testing Association to Benjamin Kremmel for his presentation "The more, the merrier? Issues in measuring vocabulary size" at the 37th Language Testing Research Colloquium in Toronto, Canada.
Benjamin Kremmel’s co-authored article “Re-examining the content validation of a grammar test: The (im)possibility of distinguishing vocabulary and structural knowledge” was commended by the jury of the LFUI Best Student Paper Award 2014 of the University of Innsbruck.
The 2013 Caroline Clapham IELTS Masters Award has been awarded to Benjamin Kremmel for his dissertation “Explaining Variance in Reading Test Performance through Linguistic Knowledge: The Relative Significance of Vocabulary, Syntactic and Phraseological Knowledge in Predicting Second Language Reading Comprehension”.
The 2013 Innovation in Assessment Award of the British Council was awarded to Carol Spöttl, Kathrin Eberharter and Doris Frötscher for their project “Real-time marker support for national high-stakes school-leaving examinations”.