Plenary Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Atta Gebril
American University in Cairo

Atta Gebril is an associate professor and MATESOL program director at the Department of Applied Linguistics, American University in Cairo (AUC). He also serves as chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at AUC. He obtained his PhD in foreign language and ESL Education with a minor in language testing from the University of Iowa. He previously worked for American College Testing (ACT, Inc.) from 2005 - 2006 where he was part of the Workkeys team. In addition, he has been working as an assessment and evaluation consultant and has participated in several test development projects in many parts of the world. His research interests include writing assessment, reading-writing connections, assessment literacy, and test validation. His dissertation work focused on score generalizability of academic writing tasks. He serves as an associate editor of Language Assessment Quarterly since 2018 and he is also on the editorial boards of the Journal of Language Testing, Assessing Writing, and TESOL Journal. His work has appeared in top-tier journals including Language Assessment Quarterly, Language Testing, Assessing Writing, Second Language Writing, Assessment in Education, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, and Teacher Development. His book entitled Assessment Myths, co-authored with Lia Plakans was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2015. He has also written Applied Linguistics in the Middle East and North Africa and it was published by John Benjamins in 2017. In 2019, he won the ‘Best Article in the Field of Language Testing’ award from the International Language Testing Association (ILTA).