ABSTRACT
This vignette, based on a story in theNew York Times (Levy, 2010), describes part of a test of spoken Estonian required since 2008of teachers andother civil servants. In this small former Soviet republic on the Baltic Sea, the government has beenmounting a determined campaign to elevate the status of its native language and tomarginalizeRussian, the tongue of its former colonizer. Public schools, where students have long been taught inRussian, are now linguistic battlegrounds and the test itself is a skirmish between Estonian and Russian. The test and Ms. Muravyova’s experience illustrate two social dimensions of language testing:Thefirst is the construct of language knowledge onwhich the test is built and onwhich test results are interpreted; the second is what happens to individuals, societies, and institutions when the test is used-the social consequences of assessment. In this chapter, I describe both of these dimensions and argue that, until quite recently, language tests have been built on incomplete knowledge of the social ground of language in interaction and the social consequences of language assessment.
Language testing is a branch of applied linguistics and applied linguistics grew out of earlier work by linguists. Linguists trace the history of their field to ancient India and usually to Pa-ṇini, who flourished
in the fourth century BCE.One of Pa-ṇini’smain concernswas the correct pronunciation of the body of oral chants of ancient poems known as theVeda composed in an early form of Sanskrit that was already archaic by the fourth century. About a thousand years earlier in Shang Dynasty China, we have the earliest written records of a language that today we call Chinese. Ancient Chinese writing was found inscribed on animal bones and turtle shells used for divination. In those days when a ruler wanted advice, he would ask the spirits of his ancestors and other supernatural beings a question, which was written by court officials on an oracle bone or turtle shell. This was then heated, and court officials interpreted the pattern of cracks in the bone as an answer to the question. In these two ancient examples, interpreting language written on bones and correcting the
pronunciation of sacred oral chants was done by people whom today we would call linguists. Linguists today do much the same thing; that is, they take a record in some form and consider (and oftentimes correct) its oral form just like Pa-ṇini in ancient India, or they interpret the meaning of a written record that has been responded to in some way just like the court officials in Shang Dynasty China. Throughout the long history of their field, linguists have been bound by the physical form of the records that they consider data. When a society transitions from one physical form of language to another-from an oral culture to restricted forms of literacy, for instance-people often complain that the written record does not do justice to the hurly-burly of oral social interaction. In the oral culture of Anglo-Saxon England, when only a select few could read or write, there were many metaphors contrasting the written record with the spoken word. Written words were called ‘mouthless speakers’, ‘dead lifegivers’, and ‘dumb knowledgebearers’. To the Anglo-Saxons, the written record of interaction was dead, dumb, and limiteda thing. In contrast, spoken interaction itself is not a thing but a live discursive practice, which the technology of writing took and alienated from the world in which it was originally created. As the Anglo-Saxon scholar O’Brien O’Keeffe (1990: 54) wrote, ‘The technology which preserves also kills’. Today we can go beyond the remembrances of speech and written records that constrained
ancient linguists and offended ancient readers. In the twenty-first century, we have still pictures, sound recordings, and movies and, thanks to these new records, our understanding of the forms and functions of language in human interaction-the social life of language-extends far beyond what we know about the forms that language takes in speech and writing. To revivify language, to put language back in its social context, a theory is needed which goes beyond records of disembodied and decontextualized records. The response is Practice Theory, developed by anthropologists (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990; Sahlins, 1981, 1985), sociologists (de Certeau, 1984; Giddens, 1984), and applied linguists (Erickson, 2004; Young, 2009), whose aim was to explicate the nature of social interaction in context. Practice Theorists study discursive practices like language tests; this involves understanding not only the production of meanings by participants as they employ the communicative resources at their command, but also how employment of such resources reflects and creates the processes and meanings of the community in which the test occurs. As Erickson (2004) wrote, although the conduct of talk in local social interaction is unique and crafted by local social actors for the specific situation of its use at the moment of its uttering, it is at the same time profoundly influenced by processes that occur beyond the temporal and spatial horizon of the immediate occasion of interaction. The goal of Practice Theory is to describe both the global context of action and the communicative resources that participants employ in local action. When the context of a practice is known and the configuration of communicative resources is described, the ultimate aim of Practice Theory is to explain the ways in which the global context and the local employment of resources are mutually constituted. Features of global context are described later in this chapter, but how does the global context influence the nature of the test? In other words, how does the global context impact social constructs in language tests?
