Arthur Hughes

Arthur Hughes is a British applied linguist long associated with the University of Reading, where he worked in the Department of Linguistic Science. His career has centred on language testing, and his Testing for Language Teachers remains the most widely assigned introduction to the subject in teacher education.

Hughes's achievement is not theoretical flash but sustained pedagogic clarity. Testing for Language Teachers is the rare technical book that genuinely explains, in ordinary language, how to build a defensible classroom or institutional test — specifications, item writing, piloting, analysis, and the discipline of thinking about validity and reliability before anything else. For hundreds of thousands of trainees, this is where they first learn that assessment is a craft.

Career

• PhD in Linguistics
• Long academic career at the University of Reading
• Substantial consultancy with testing bodies and ministries of education

Published Work

• Testing for Language Teachers (1989, 2003) — the standard textbook
• New Ways of Classroom Assessment (co-edited volumes)
• Various chapters on writing assessment and rater training

Influence

• Shaped how most classroom teachers learn the rudiments of language testing
• His treatment of test specifications and washback popularized those terms in teacher education
• Grounded the idea that principled test construction is not only for large testing organizations