The 8th International ALTE Conference, the largest language testing forum in Europe, kicks off this Wednesday

The Secretary General of the Instituto Cervantes, Carmen Noguero Galilea, will open the 8th International ALTE (Association of Language Testers in Europe) Conference, co-organised by the Instituto Cervantes, together with the Secretary General of ALTE, Nick Saville. The Deputy Director of Migration Analysis of the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, Amparo González Ferrer, will attend the Language Assessment for Migration and Inclusion (LAMI) forum on Friday, the closing day of the conference.

After suffering the cancellation of its 2020 edition, the international conference of ALTE, the largest conference on language testing in Europe, will be held from 26 to 28 April in Madrid. This year, Latin American and East Asian language testing associations will be invited to participate in an event that will bring together 350 international specialists from different fields of language testing and will feature more than 100 presentations.  

Under the slogan "Prepared for the future", this year's event will focus on the digital future, diversity and inclusion in language testing and the implementation of reference frameworks.  

The sessions will include talks by leading language testing professionals such as Neus Figueras and Linda Taylor. The talks can be followed by videoconference and simultaneous translation will be available.  

In addition, over the three days of the event, technicians from the Language Certification Unit of the Instituto Cervantes who develop the DELE and SIELE examinations for Spanish as a foreign language will participate in the sessions with four presentations on their work in language assessment.    

In addition, the Instituto Cervantes headquarters will host a gala reception for those attending on Thursday 27 April in the evening.   

To close the programme, the international conference will host the LAMI Forum (Language Assessment for Migration and Inclusion), entitled "The defence of language assessors in the context of migration", which will be presented by Amparo González Ferrer, Deputy Director of Migration Analysis at the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration. Interested parties can register for this activity separately from the general subscription.  

In the framework of this forum, they will present their latest publication: "LAMI-LASLLIAM (Literacy and Second Language Learning for the Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants) Assessment Tools", a document with English and Spanish versions, prepared for the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe.

The LAMI group was set up in Salamanca in 2002 with the aim of supporting the initiatives of language testing professionals to ensure fairness in language testing and social justice in the context of migration, in line with ALTE's mission to support diversity on the European continent. The LAMI group is currently collaborating with the Council of Europe on studies analysing the growing importance of language testing in migration policy.  

Submitted by José Antonio Sierra, Hispanismo advisor.