While the importance of accounting for the use of language tests as immigration and citizenship policy instruments is by now widely acknowledged, core assumptions underlying fairness and validation frameworks in language testing preclude consideration of the lived experiences of migrants subjected to testing practices, and of the subjectivities and agency these experiences engender (Frost, 2019). Frameworks remain centred on the intentions of test users, with test taker intentions occupying a marginal position, at best; test takers feature primarily as theoretical abstractions rather than as real persons, deconstructed into the components of knowledge and skills that constitute test constructs. As a result, the dynamic ways that test taker agency is produced in an through interactions with testing practices remain hidden from view, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the field to meaningfully engage with the wider societal consequences and ethical implications generated by test uses for immigration and citizenship.
In this paper, I outline the complex ways in which English testing operates within an education-employment-immigration policy nexus in Australia, regulating parallel transitions from tertiary study into employment, and from temporary to permanent status. I draw on migrant experiences of English testing at transition points in their trajectories to highlight the disconnect between how test takers, test users, and language testers come to attribute meanings to testing practices, and the types of conflicting decisions and actions which emerge. Drawing on Foucault (2008), I argue for a view of language testing as a technology of neoliberal governance, operating at a distance and no longer serving to produce docile subjects, as conceptualised in work by McNamara (2012) and earlier work by Shohamy (e.g., 2001), but functioning as part of a broader apparatus to produce active, enterprising individuals. These individuals, as 'desirable' migrants, act to enhance their human capital value, thereby promoting values of competitiveness and adaptability, which align with wider government objectives of promoting economic agility and resilience in the face of global uncertainties. I conclude by calling for a renewed criticality in language testing, which encompasses an interrogation of wider discourses of English as a commodity and an aspect of human capital, and which confronts the roles of our own expertise in reifying potentially obsolete notions of standard English, and producing idealisations of migrant identities, and of language learning and learners, whereby economic value and profit are privileged over more long term, sustainable and meaningful educational and social agendas.
Bibilography:
Foucault, M. (2008) The birth of biopolitics. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008.
Frost, K. (2019). Language testing in immigration policy: Transitioning from fairness to social justice. In C. Roever and G. Wigglesworth (Eds.), Social Perspectives on language testing: Papers in honour of Tim McNamara (pp. 43–54). Peter Lang.
McNamara, T. (2012). Language assessments as Shibboleths: A poststructuralist perspective. Applied Linguistics 33(5), 564–81. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams052
Shohamy, E. (2001). The power of tests: A critical perspective of the uses of language tests. Singapore: Longman.
