Staff Profiles
Dr Tom Lumley
Senior Research Fellow
MA Oxford , Dip Ed LaTrobe , MA, PhD Melbourne
Dr Tom Lumley is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research in the Assessment and Reporting research program.
His current work with ACER includes management of TORCH Plus, an extension of the widely used Tests of Reading Comprehension (TORCH).
His research interests include written and spoken performance assessment and rater behaviour in academic and workplace-related contexts. His PhD won the TOEFL Jacqueline A. Ross Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Research on Second/Foreign Language Testing, and was published in 2005 by Peter Lang under the title Assessing Second Language Writing: The Rater's Perspective. His major recent research projects include a TOEFL-funded investigation of test takers’ and raters’ responses to integrated reading and writing tasks. A co-author of the Language Testing Dictionary (CUP, 1999), his work is published regularly in Language Testing and elsewhere. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly and Assessing Writing.
Dr Lumley joined ACER in 2004 with a specialist background in second language assessment. Tom was Assistant Professor in the English Department at Hong Kong Polytechnic University from 1997 to 2002, where his teaching involved a range of undergraduate courses in English, postgraduate courses on language testing & assessment and research methodology in ELT, as well as supervision of MA and PhD students in language education. He was responsible for the development, trialling and implementation of the Graduating Students’ Language Proficiency Assessment-English (GLSPA), a standardised exit test of English for university students in Hong Kong. Organisations for whom he has consulted in Hong Kong include the Hong Kong Examinations Authority, the Hong Kong Education Department and City University of Hong Kong.
He taught ESL and EFL in Spain and Australia before joining the Language Testing Research Centre at the University of Melbourne in 1991. There, he worked on research and development for a wide range of English language tests and assessment procedures used in primary and secondary schools and universities, in professional and workplace communication, and for immigration purposes. He has worked on standard-setting projects for the University of Melbourne, the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs and the National Office for Overseas Skills Recognition.