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About the Book
This volume represents the proceedings of the Pike Center symposium on Evidence-Based Research in Language Program Assessment that was embedded within SIL’s 8th International Language Assessment Conference held 17-24 September 2004 in Penang, Malaysia. The theme of the conference was: “How are good decisions made in language programs?” The premise of the symposium was that they should be based on solid evidence. The papers explore methods that can be used to create such evidence, including:
- New methods for gathering the kinds of data that are needed
- Construction of large datasets for analysis of results across programs
- Methods of data analysis for producing evidence-based insights
- Studies that report evidence-based results
About the Editors
Gary F. Simons is a Research Associate with SIL International (Dallas, TX) and Executive Editor of the Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/). He is also Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics at Dallas International University. Previously he has served in SIL as Director of Academic Computing (1986-1999), Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs (1999-2009), and Chief Research Officer (2010-2024). Early in his career he was involved in language development activities in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. More recently he has contributed to the development of cyberinfrastructure for linguistics as co-founder of the Open Language Archives Community (http://www.language-archives.org/) and co-developer of the ISO 639-3 standard of three-letter identifiers for all known languages of the world (http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/). He holds a PhD in general linguistics (with minor emphases in computer science and classics) from Cornell University. He is an author or editor of over 100 publications (http://www.sil.org/~simonsg/).
Stephen Watters is SIL's Chief Research Officer and Director of the Pike Center for Integrative Scholarship. He holds an occasional adjunct teaching position at Baylor University, and is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University. He holds an MA in linguistics from the University of Texas at Arlington and a PhD in linguistics from Rice University. He has done fieldwork throughout South Asia and the Himalaya with interest in many aspects of sociolinguistics, linguistics, and translation.