ABSTRACT
In the introduction to his book, Empowering Education, Ira Shor discusses his students’ feelings of failure and frustration in relation to the City University Writing Assessment Test (CWAT) and tells how he used their feelings and experiences as the source of the class’s inquiry for “critical teaching” and “dialogic pedagogy.” He raised questions for readers to consider: What do our tests do? What is communicated about writing and language development through our use of such tests? Shor was describing a class of native English speakers enrolled in a basic writing course at the College of Staten Island approximately 20 years ago. The feelings of failure and frustration exist equally among English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students who, 20 years later, are still facing the same test under more or less the same conditions. * Even more interesting, perhaps, faculty are still asking the same questions: What do our tests do? What is communicated about writing and language?
