ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the claim that has been made repeatedly by testing professionals associated with international testing conglomerates, i.e. that linguistic mediation cannot be tested. It does so by presenting a case study which can be used as a model for the inclusion of linguistic mediation in language proficiency testing, which exerts power on language education policies and has a backwash effect on language teaching and learning. Specifically, the paper focuses on linguistic mediation featuring as an aspect of the national foreign language proficiency examinations in six languages for the State Certificate of Language Proficiency in Greece and makes a detailed presentation of how mediation was developed as a testing construct; how it was conceptualised and operationalised in this glocal multilingual examination suite. The rationale for translingual practices in the test papers and the concepts of cross-linguistic and intralinguistic mediation are explained in connection with the theory of language on which the examination suite is grounded. Past paper examples of scaled tasks that test linguistic mediation are discussed with a view to showing that what candidates are expected to be able to do and how at each level of proficiency are test task dependent. This is actually the reason that this exam system used a bottom-up task-banking methodology rather than a top-down implementation of intuitive scaled descriptors and guidelines.
