In today’s world information and communication technology has almost integrated with every human work. Computer along with the internet have become one of the most important tool and has sparked a revolution and made the current era a digital age. The integration of computer to language learning and teaching is the most commonly practiced mode of language education worldwide. Computer-assisted language testing (CALT) employs computer applications eliciting and evaluating test takers’ performance in a second language. CALT encompasses computer-adaptive testing (CAT), the use of multimedia in language test tasks, and automatic response analysis (Chapelle & Douglas, 2006). While learning and teaching a language, especially a foreign language, becomes the most essential part. The three main motives for using technology in language testing are efficiency, equivalence, and innovation. The paper aims to highlight the detailed description of CALT along with its various dimensions; its application and the methods involved. It will also throw lights on assessing English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Since technology is a challenging task, particularly computer and language teaching and learning, it will explore the challenges of CALT, referring to Indian Classrooms.

The field of education has evolved in many different ways since technology was implemented as a tool that facilitates the teaching and learning process. Instructors, administrators, students, parents and book editors and writers have experienced during the last decades the greatest revolution that ever happened in the classroom. This advancement has been influenced basically by the introduction and use of the computer in the teaching and learning process. Thus, learning became significantly richer as students started having access to new and different types of information, as they manipulated it on the computer through graphic displays or controlled experiments in ways never before possible, and as they could be able to communicate their results and conclusions in a variety of media to their teachers, students in the next classroom, or students around the world. Assessment, as an integral ongoing part of such a process, has also been affected by the integration of technology. The aim of this paper is to present the history and evolution of technology-enhanced assessment in language testing from the introduction of Computer-based testing (CBT) in the mid-80s to the most recent advances in the field, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages in their use. The second part of the paper focuses on Computer Assisted Language Testing (CALT) as a field and the advantages and drawbacks associated to it. The ultimate goal of this paper is to present the current state of the art and to explore the future of technology-enhanced language testing, based on existing practices and methodologies.