Language Testing: Week 1
So this semester, one of my two units is Language Testing. I am glad that the content for the first week has problematised language testing straight up.
The definition of language assessment provided is: gathering evidence and forming inferences about an individual’s language ability, and justifying actions or decisions made on the basis of these inferences.
The key point of interest for me is that language assessments are used to grant or deny legitimacy to either:
the person as a speaker of the language and/or a member of a community
the language (or ways of using the language) as prestigious and valuable
Obviously, language assessments can be used in incredibly impactful ways, such as deciding someone’s citizenship, ability to work, entrance into university or a particular course, etc.
I was also interested to learn from the main reading of the week that the whole idea of examinations apparently derives from entrance examinations to Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the mid-19th century. At this time, examinations were oral, then later became written. As well as knowledge of a subject, candidates were judged on how “gentlemanly” they appeared. Tests as a particular format of assessment were later popularised by “mental tests” for US army recruitment in the early 20th century.
Language testing only really came to the fore in the mid-20th century, largely through language aptitude testing for US intelligence/military/diplomacy. In a context where not a lot of the monolingual English population learnt languages sufficiently through school, the government wanted to find candidates who were inclined to learn languages quickly. Meanwhile, Britain used proficiency tests for modern languages to qualify foreign language teachers.
[Tsagari, D., & Banerjee, J. (2016). Handbook of Second Language Assessment. Boston; Berlin: De Gruyter.]
I won’t track the rest of the history for how this developed into the large scale standardised English tests which dominant much of the world today, but suffice to say, it was quite interesting to see how much of a modern construct testing really is.