Responsibilities and opportunities in language testing with respect to historicized forms of socio-political discrimination: A matter of academic citizenship

Abstract

The title and themes of this Virtual Special Issue (VSI) encompass potential pathways to unpack how language testing has functioned within and as oppressive systems. It also places a spotlight on the glaring gaps and underlying issues in engagement with individual and/or intersectional structural, institutional, and political forms of discrimination within language testing research in this journal specifically. Peoples who have been historically underrepresented or marginalized in relation to class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, and/or language, among other reasons, continue to be oftignored. In putting together this VSI, our searches of many key terms to identify work with respect to these issues yielded no articles. We see this result as indicative of (1) venues other than Language Testing (the journal is referred to henceforth as LT to contrast with references to the field of language testing) publishing this work and (2) underlying issues around the limited engagement in such social dimensions overall in the field (Spolsky, 2008). These decisions lead to a highly filtered focus that detrimentally excludes key social issues and their relevance to language testing as a field and its contribution to broader society. For our VSI, we highlight concerns with the current state of affairs and propose pathways forward to re-expand academic citizenry for our field and this journal.

Bias, Discrimination, and the Social Consequences of Unproblematized Assessments in TESOL

“…Although a bit of a simplification, one perspective is more focused on notions of objectivism in operationalizing these phenomena, whereas the other is focused on contextualization in investigating and interrogating these phenomena. The need for an emphasis on this latter area is great because prevalent approaches have often overlooked work that takes the social dimension and implications of assessments seriously (Schissel & Khan, 2021).…”