Asian Association for Language Assessment

In the last seven decades, international assessments have provided assessments to immigrants from the Global South (GS) who are forced to take language tests in order to assist institutions in the Global North (GN) with school and university admission, employment, residency and citizenship. Illustrating this point from the perspective of international English language assessments, providers have very casually considered issues related to English as Lingua Franca (ELF) (for general definitions and discussions of ELF, see Brown, 2014; Canagarajah, 2006; Jenkins and Leung, 2014, 2024; Ockey and Hirsch, 2020, and Harding, 2022). Inspirational works recently include the development of an ELF construct (Harding and McNamara, 2018) and a demonstration test (Ockey and Hirsch (2020)). Following the latter study, issues that need to be addressed include rhetorical sensitivity, context sensitivity, international communication competence, grammatical and lexical appropriacy, and discourse sensitivity. Such a plan would ensure a more inclusive and representative language assessment, derived with dialogue with stakeholders such as students, faculty, community members as well as higher education institutions in the GS. This activity would help GN institutions understand the language capabilities and needs of GS language learners/test takers better.