Alan Davies is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh where he was first appointed in 1965. He has taught English and Applied Linguistics in the UK, Kenya, Nepal, Canada and Austria. In recent years he has been Professorial Fellow in the University of Melbourne and Director of the Language Testing Research Centre there. He is former Chair of the British Association of Applied Linguistics and former Secretary-General of the International Association of Applied Linguistics. For the year 2000 he is President of the International Language Testing Association. He is former Editor of the journals Applied Linguistics and Language Testing. Among his publications are: Language Testing Symposium (1968), Testing and Experimental Methods, Volume 4, in Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics (1977), Interlanguage (1984), Principles of Language Testing (1990), The Native Speaker in Applied Linguistics (1991), The Bilingual Interface Project (joint author, 1997), and Mark My Words: Assessing Second and Foreign Language Skills (set of 6 videos, joint author, 1996). He is principal author of the Dictionary of Language Testing (1999), and his Introduction to Applied Linguistics: From Practice to Theory, the first volume in a new series from Edinburgh University Press, also appeared in 1999.