Carsten Roever is Professor in Applied Linguistics in the School of Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne, where he also holds the position of Discipline Chair, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. He earned his PhD in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2001, with a dissertation titled “A computer-based test of interlanguage pragmatic knowledge,” supervised by Gabriele Kasper. Prior to his doctorate, Roever completed undergraduate and master’s degrees at Gerhard Mercator University of Duisburg in Germany, during which he worked with Christine Klein-Braley on language testing research, including the C-test. Following his PhD, he was employed in test validation at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey, from 2001 to 2002. He joined the University of Melbourne thereafter, advancing from senior lecturer to associate professor and subsequently to full professor.

Roever’s research specializations are language testing, second language pragmatics, second language acquisition, interlanguage pragmatics, and cross-cultural communication. He serves as an associate of the Language Testing Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. His major publications include Testing ESL Pragmatics (2005, Peter Lang), Language Testing: The Social Dimension co-authored with Tim McNamara (2006, Blackwell Publishing), Measuring Second Language Pragmatic Competence: A psycholinguistic perspective on the development of L2 pragmatic proficiency (2009, Multilingual Matters), Second Language Pragmatics co-authored with Naoko Taguchi (2017, Oxford University Press), and Teaching and Testing Second Language Pragmatics and Interaction: A Practical Guide (2021, Routledge). Roever’s work has received over 7,800 citations on Google Scholar. In 2015, he and Naoki Ikeda were awarded a TOEFL grant for their project “Measures of Interactional Competence for TOEFL Speaking.” He delivered a plenary address at the Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) in 2025.

Professional Email: carsten@unimelb.edu.au