This book had its beginnings in a motel room in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was there, planning the schedule for the soon-to-be-inaugurated Reading English for Science and Technology (REST) project at the University of Guadalajara, that I rediscovered a manuscript passed on to me by Russ Campbell. The manuscript was a copy of a paper delivered by Michael Long at a TESOL convention (later published in TESOL Quarterly [Long 1984]). Reading that paper provided the revelation that led to a preliminary design for evaluating the project, which became the focus of my dissertation, which, in turn, evolved over a six-year period into this book.

Drawing upon the experience of implementing and evaluating the REST project from June 1985 to July 1987 reported on in my dissertation, I constructed the initial outlines of a book designed to provide a thorough theoretical background for the evaluation of language education programs, as well as a guide for putting theory into practice. The earlier drafts of the book made use of insights and feedback gained from teaching a graduate seminar for applied linguistics students at UCLA and from my experience as Academic Director of the ESL Service Courses at UCLA, as well as from supervising graduate student research into program evaluation and serving as evaluator for the California Foreign Language Teacher Preparation Project.

The result of these experiences is a book that presents program evaluation against the historical backdrop of modern language teaching and the development of research in applied linguistics.