Introduction

This chapter has two principal aims. The first is to provide a review of previous evaluation studies in foreign language teaching, so that future evaluations may be informed by past experience in the field; the second, to set the evaluation of language education within the broader framework of educational evaluation.

An overview of the history and development of the evaluation of language education since the early 1960s is presented. Although occasional studies were carried out before the 1960s, the past quarter of a century has seen a notable growth in such studies and therefore the period from the 1960s to the present will be the focus of the review. In addition, reference is also made, in the second part of the chapter, to evaluation studies and theory in education more generally. The aim is not to be exhaustive, but to characterise trends and developments in language education evaluation.

To date, very few books have appeared on the evaluation of language teaching programs in general. This compares unfavorably with the general field of educational evaluation, where dozens of titles appear annually in one publishing house alone (Sage). In the language teaching journals, evaluation studies are rarely published which do not focus on the seemingly never-ending ‘methods’ debate (which had wearied Sweet as long ago as 1899) or on the highly politicised bilingual programs. Yet in the educational and social spheres, specialist evaluation journals proliferate.