Positionality, participation, and humility: Theorizing language assessment practices in local contexts
Local language assessments can be evaluated through the technical work of developing, implementing, and maintaining tests in accordance with professional standards. At the same time, it creates rich and complex relationships among participants (stakeholders), who gradually and jointly shape the local assessment ecosystem (its purposes, practices, and impact). Attending to their situated perspectives can help inform how assessment is experienced and enacted in a local setting.
Much of the work surrounding local language assessment involves building consensus or working through disagreements. Disagreements among participants can reveal their differing positionalities: what they know, what is at stake for them, what responsibilities they carry, and how much authority they have to shape the outcome. Working through such differences may require recognizing assessment expertise across roles, negotiating influence over assessment decisions, and clarifying accountability for their consequences. Arguably, these interactions also create opportunities for language assessment literacy (LAL) development.
In this talk, I explore episodes of consensus building and disagreement among stakeholders in different contexts. Specifically, I ask how participants’ positionalities, relationships, and opportunities to act shape both what a local community learns about assessment and the practices it co-constructs. I argue that while local language assessments should be guided by professional standards, we must also examine the local assessment ecosystem from a participatory perspective, attending to participants’ roles and perspectives and to how LAL develops organically within the community.
Xun Yan
Xun Yan is a professor of Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education, and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is a faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. His research interests include speaking and writing assessment, psycholinguistic and computational approaches to language testing, and language assessment literacy. His work has been published widely in international journals in language assessment and applied linguistics. He is a co-editor for Language Testing and the incoming Editor-in-Chief for Language Learning. Xun was the recipient of the ETS TOEFL Essentials New Scholar award in 2022, and in the ILTA/Sage Best Book Award in 2024.
From global to local, from fair to just: Language assessment in multilingual higher education
The conference theme invites a timely move from global to local assessment, and the question is pressing: as ever more students learn in a language other than their own, at home or abroad, long-standing inequalities in who is assessed, by whom and on whose terms become harder to ignore. Language testing has long recognised that tests are powerful tools, and that a test can be fair – validly measuring what it claims to – without it being used in a way that is just (Shohamy, 2001, 2017; McNamara et al., 2019; Deygers, 2017, 2019). Scholars have called on testers to act against misuse (Carlsen & Rocca, 2022), and Dimova (2017, 2020) has shown how local tests can be designed for social justice, supporting rather than excluding those they assess.
Yet test use is often decided by markets, governments and universities, not testers. Interviews with European ministers and rectors show EMI adopted not for educational reasons but to meet recruitment targets, funding formulae and ranking indicators (Hultgren et al., in press). In this performance culture, language tests often become one more metric: the scores and cut-offs that admit international students, certify lecturers and make proficiency auditable. Moreover, these metrics do not arise in a historical vacuum, nor are they culturally neutral. Colonial legacies continue to shape whose English counts as proficient, whose norms set the standard and whose institutions certify it (O’Regan, 2021; Quijano, 2000), as when Northern institutions “quality-assure” Southern assessment in transnational validation partnerships, even when that assessment is local (Hamdi et al., in review).
Even a local test can therefore be used unjustly if the metrics, politics and hierarchies that govern its use remain unchanged. Just assessment thus needs political will, not only good intentions. Building on the field’s own call, I propose three shifts: from gatekeeping to learning, from monolingual to multilingual constructs and from Northern to shared ownership. Testers can help bring these about by challenging misuses of tests through ‘language test activism’ (Carlsen & Rocca, 2022).
Anna Kristina Hultgren
Anna Kristina Hultgren is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at The Open University, UK. Trained in linguistics (DPhil, Oxford) and public policy analysis (LSE), she works at the intersection of linguistics and political science to uncover how inequalities are created, perpetuated and challenged through language and discourse. Her research on English-medium instruction, language policy and higher education governance includes the forthcoming monograph New Public Management and English as a Medium of Instruction (Cambridge University Press). She currently leads the UKRI-funded project “Universities Fit for the Future? Democratising Governance in Neoliberalised Higher Education”.
