ABSTRACT
This chapter is about who has done the testing, what they have been testing, and to what end. It is not a technical history of the instruments of testing, but in intended to "contextualize the practice of language testing as a socially constructed and interpreted phenomenon". The chapter merely offers a thematic overview of foreign language assessment in Britain since the 1850s. A focus on the examinations at age 18 might have been valuable for international comparisons, but it concentrates largely on the under-16 examinations because relatively few pupils continue to an A-level language. The chapter argues that questions testing memorized grammatical knowledge are on the same cognitive level, as being able to write out words or short phrases from memory in writing tasks, which feature prominently in the National Curriculum attainment targets. One considerable change over the history of language examinations is the diminishing prominence of non-language knowledge and of skills not related to proficiency in the foreign language.
