Working Towards a Proficiency Scale of Business English Writing: A Mixed-Methods Approach

This book presents an empirical study to develop and validate a proficiency scale of business English writing in the Chinese tertiary context. Through a mixture of intuitive, quantitative and qualitative methods, the book demonstrates how a pool of descriptors are collectively formulated, statistically calibrated and meticulously validated for the establishment of a proficiency scale of business English writing. The writing scale differs in significant ways from the existing language scales, most of which were constructed in English as L1 or L2 contexts and applied to English for General Purposes (EGP) domains. This book also provides important insights into the construct of business English writing as well as the methods for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) proficiency scale development and validation. It is of particular interest to those who work in the area of ESP teaching and assessment.

Li Wang is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an International Studies University, China. She obtained her Ph. D. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2016, and her master’s degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2010. Her research interests include English for Specific Purposes and Language Testing and Assessment. She has published her research in both international and local journals, including Assessing Writing, The Asian EFL Journal, The Journal of Asia TEFL, and Foreign Language World.

Jason Fan is Deputy Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Language Testing Research Centre (LTRC), University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include validation of language assessments and research methods. He is the author of Development and Validation of Standards in Language Testing (Fudan University Press, 2018) andthe co-author (with Tim McNamara and Ute Knoch) of Fairness, Justice and Language Assessment (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is on the editorial board of Language Testing and the co-editor of Papers in Language Testing and Assessment.