This study deals with the historical, sociological, economic and political aspects of language testing in the 20th century. It examines the quest for objectivity and the rise of public and institutional tests, as well as future developments in the field of English language testing.

Measured Words explores the rich commerce between computation and writing that proliferated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. In this captivating and generously illustrated work, Arielle Saiber studies the relationship between number, shape, and the written word in the works of four exceptional thinkers of the time: Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Giambattista Della Porta. Although these Renaissance humanists came from different social classes and practised the mathematical and literary arts at varying levels of sophistication, they were all guided by a sense that there exist deep ontological and epistemological bonds between computational and verbal thinking and production. Their shared view that a network or continuity exists between the literary arts and mathematics yielded extraordinary results, from Alberti’s treatise on cryptography and Pacioli’s design calculations for the Roman alphabet to Tartaglia’s poetic solutions of cubic equations and Della Porta’s dramatic applications of geometry. Through lively, cogent analysis of these and other related texts of the period, Measured Words presents, literally and figuratively, brilliant examples of what interdisciplinary work can offer us.

This volume establishes how English language constructs were measured in Cambridge English examinations over the period 1913 to 2012. An addition to the Studies in Language Testing series, this volume provides an overview of English language testing over the last century, with coverage of key theoretical and practical aspects of the assessment of reading, listening, writing and speaking skills. It includes examples of the Cambridge English exams, old and new, and is the first volume to describe in a systematic way the different theoretical influences which have shaped the development of the constructs underlying Cambridge English exams in the last 100 years.

Measured Language presents studies using forms of measurement and quantitative analysis current in diverse areas of linguistic research from language assessment to language change, from generative linguistics to experimental psycholinguistics, and from longitudinal studies to classroom research.