ABSTRACT
It may seem counterintuitive to begin a chapter in a collection devoted to generation 1.5 with a quote about language policy. The connection between the 1.5 metaphor and language policy, critical or otherwise, is not immediately obvious. Yet, I hope to show in this chapter that the generation 1.5 category, due to its modernist assumptions about languages and identities, may have the unintended effect of supporting exclusionary language and testing policies. That is, I will claim that language-assessment procedures adopted by universities in immigrant-receiving countries are often based on modernist beliefs, ones that ignore the linguistic complexity of the global diaspora. In doing so they may exclude immigrant students by constructing them as linguistically unprepared for university study, an assumption bolstered by the generation 1.5 metaphor. To counter this exclusionary tendency, I will propose a critical perspective, one informed by postmodern assumptions.
