Alan Davies

Biography

Alan Davies (1931–2015) was Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, where he taught and researched across applied linguistics for fifty years after graduating from Oxford in 1953. He was a central figure in the British applied-linguistics tradition — author of Principles of Language Testing (1990) and A Dictionary of Language Testing (1999), founding Director of the Language Testing Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, and a past President of the International Language Testing Association. He served as editor of Applied Linguistics and, from its launch by Edward Arnold in 1984, of Language Testing, shaping the field's first dedicated journal through its early volumes.