Asian Association for Language Assessment

The assessment of language proficiency, particularly in the form of  standardized language testing, is often associated with the notions of  conceptual stability and measurement trustwor¬thiness. In this talk my  focus is on the shifting conceptualizations of English as an  additional/second language proficiency in the past fifty years or so. I  will argue that the notion of English proficiency, as it has been  discussed in the world-wide English language Teaching (ELT) literature,  is an artefact shaped by the ebbs and flows of intellectual movements  and conceptual recontextualizations. The onset of the concept of  communicative competence in the 1970s serves as the point of departure  for this discussion. I will first give an account of the ways in which  this concept has been filtered through a particular set of disciplinary  and ideological perspectives that gave rise to a particular Anglocentric  view of language communication and a universalist approach to  curriculum development and assessment of proficiency. Following on from  that, I will look at some of the recent research in relevant fields such  as English as a Lingua Franca, flexible multilingualism and  translanguaging that recognize more cross-lingual, dynamic and situated  language use; these bodies of research have also signalled the need to  embrace multilingualism in conceptualizing language proficiency. That  said, there are complex implications of this more fluid view for  language assessment. I will illustrate some of the challenges by  analysing the conceptual and technical difficulties found in an  international language curricu¬lum and assessment framework as it  attempts to embody a more interactionally dynamic, linguistically fluid  approach. In the final part of the discussion, I will explore the  possible ways of expanding the notion of English language proficiency  that can work with local language practices and assessments productively  in different world locations.