The Editors: Annie Brown is Associate Director for Assessment and Professional Development in the Ministry of Higher Education in the United Arab Emirates. She is on the Executive Board of ILTA and the Editorial Boards of Language Assessment Quarterly and Assessing Writing.Kathryn Hill teaches clinical communication skills in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne (Australia). She is currently completing her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne.

• Contents: Ana Maria Ducasse: Raters as Scale Makers for an L2 Spanish Speaking Test: Using Paired Test Discourse to Develop a Rating Scale for Communicative Interaction – Tomoko Horai: Intra-task Comparison in a Monologic Oral Performance Test: The Impact of Task Manipulation on Performance – Thomas Eckes: On Common Ground? How Raters Perceive Scoring Criteria in Oral Proficiency Testing – Robyn Spence-Brown: An Embedded Problem: Issues in the Use of a Pedagogic Task for Assessment – Youn-Hee Kim: Exploring Rater and Task Variability in Second Language Oral Performance Assessment – M. Usman Erdősy: Chasing Proteus: Identifying Indigenous Assessment Criteria in Academic Settings – Don Salting/Jennifer Balogh/Anish Nair/Alexandra Dunn: Predictors of Item Difficulty in an Automated Spoken English Test.