ABSTRACT
Something occurred to me the other day – I was teaching my granddaughter, Alma, who is 4 and a half, the concept of ‘riddles.’ I would ask her a question and she needed to give the answer, like – I would ask her ‘What is outside green, inside red and has black seeds?’; simple right? I could see how the question really annoyed her. I could see that she was thinking, ‘Why would she ask me questions that she knows the answer to?’ And then I thought, it annoys her because it’s like a test. Here we are having nice conversations, I am explaining to her things about life, history, geography, and in fact she keeps asking me questions, clarifications about what we talk about, ‘why is this and why is that,’ and then… I switch into a ‘Testing mode’ where I am asking her to provide me answers for things I clearly know and she may not know. At the end she may have enjoyed the fun of it, the tricking, the game, but basically it’s not something that is very natural. I hate it when very knowledgeable people, often men who are proficient in statistical facts, ask difficult questions that expose the ignorance of those being asked in relation to them – like how many people live in Antarctica. It is often very trivial information that could be found [now] on the Internet or in an encyclopedia if you only bother to look. I always perceive it as a power game. With my granddaughter I could see she felt uncomfortable about it. I think testing is an artificial type of genre; performance is fine, project, OK. So I wish we could get away from the classic testing genre of the ‘knower’ addressing the ‘nonknower’ who has to prove he or she ‘knows’ what the ‘knower knows’ via all kind of tricks, like choices, or distractors that only aim at even further confusing the one who is being asked. I find it creates fear, anxiety, stress, and distrust and even some type of indoctrination. (interview with E. Shohamy, 2011, see also Lazaraton, 2010, p. 271)
The discourse of testing
While much of the work in language testing is concerned with constructing quality tests that accurately measure language, in the past decade there has been a movement to examine the quality of tests in relation to societal, political, and educational issues. The main argument is that tests are powerful tools that play a central role in creating social classes, determining knowledge, affecting distribution of wealth, shaping language policies, and transforming teaching and learning. Accordingly, tests are not viewed as isolated and detached acts, but rather as tools that play a central role in education and society. Tests then need to be examined in relation to the strong impact they have on various societal dimensions beyond the declared intentions of just measuring knowledge. Tests need to be perceived as devices which are anchored in broad societal realities, ideologies, politics, economics, policy agendas, and diversity. Indeed, studies which originate in this perspective examine the political and ideological motivations of introducing tests, their effects on individual test takers, classrooms, schools as well as language policies in national, global, and transnational contexts (Cheng, 2008; McNamara & Roever, 2006; Messick, 1994; Shohamy, 2001, 2006). Examples are the ideologies, motivations, and impact of introducing national tests by central governments to measure knowledge of students in schools. The quality of these tests is judged not only by how well they measure the language knowledge from a measurement perspective, but rather by the motivations of introducing these tests by the educational policy agents, and the consequences that
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CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
these tests lead to for individuals and groups. Such consequences refer to inclusion and exclusion of certain groups and legitimizing or delegitimizing certain languages. Such is the case for assessing the academic content of immigrant students before they have mastered the language in which the tests are being administered and/or when the content of national tests reflects knowledge which is unique to specific groups, culture, and context and not to others.
