ABSTRACT
I have been puzzling about a title for this chapter, and itwill become clear in the course of the chapter that I remain uncertain-confused, even-about the relationship between language testing and language policy, which is why I have chosen the neutral connector “and”. My first thought was to consider language testing as a method of language management (Spolsky, 2009), that is to say, a way in which some participants in a speech community attempt to modify the language beliefs and language practices of others. Let us take a simple example: a school class in language, in which the teacher sets and marks tests that require pupils to use a version of the school language (or other language being taught) that he or she hopes that pupils will use. In essence, this assumes a belief, unfortunately widespread among those responsible for education, that testing is a good way to teach, rather than a way to gather data that needs further interpretation. Rather than take on the difficult problems of dealing with circumstances such as poverty which interfere with school success, a politician can simply propose that students who fail to pass a test (whatever that means) should be punished or even that their teacherswho fail to bring them to some arbitrary standard should befired. The general level of ignorance about testing displayed by politicians, the press, and the public is sometimes hard to believe (Taylor, 2009). How, for example, is a “pass” determined? I even recall a newspaper headline that complained half the students had failed to reach the average. Krashan (n/d) regularly draws our attention to the huge gap in achievement between middle
class and lower class schools in the United States: the former produce results as good as any other nation, while the latter pull down the national average, and international ranking results from the high percentage of child poverty in the United States. Under successive presidents of all political persuasions, US education policy has followed a brutally ineffective approach, testing and punishing rather than teaching (Menken, 2008). The same strange but convenient belief can be applied to all educational levels and topics, whether reading in the early years or mathematics in high school, so that its application to language specifically is not the point. Additionally, a decision to write a test in the standard language, whether pupils know it or not, is simply a consequence of an earlier decision to use it as the medium of instruction. A highstakes test in the national language may modify the sociolinguistic ecology of a community, but language management may not have been the first direct goal of the testing (Shohamy, 2006).
In this light, the significant effect that the Chinese Imperial Examination system had in establishing the status of written Chinese and the Beijing way of pronouncing it as the ideal version of language, paving the way for the Putonghua (common language) campaign (Kalmar et al., 1987) that is now seen as a method to unite a multilingual society, was not its original intended result, but rather an inevitable outcome of the choice of language in which this restricted higher-status elite examination was written (Franke, 1960).While the purpose of an examination may be neutral as to language, the choice of language will promote a particular variety of language and so advance its wider use. As long as the Cambridge triposwas an oral examination in Latin, it bolstered the status of those able to speak Latin:when it became awritten examination, it recognized the significance of the English vernacular. We must be prepared therefore to distinguish between the language-related results of testing and the intention to use a test to manage language policy. This may also be illustrated by the Indian Civil Service examination which helped establish the
power and importance of examinations in nineteenth-century England. In arguing for the value of an examination as a method of replacing patronage in selecting candidates for government office, Macaulay (1853, 1891) made clear his neutrality on language issues. If the English public schools taught Cherokee rather than Latin and Greek, he said in his speech in Parliament, the candidate who could compose the best verse in Cherokee would be the ideal cadet. In practice, the examination when it was established did not include Cherokee, but besides Latin and Greek, it incorporated compulsory papers in German, French, Italian, Arabic and Sanskrit (Spolsky, 1995: 19). Similarly, the testing system which the Jesuits brought back from China for their schools in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had tested a syllabus that was determined centrally and did not focus in particular on attempting to change language choice, although of course it rewarded use of the appropriate version of the school languages and punished incorrect grammar (de La Salle, 1720). But the Jesuit system was later adapted to language management during and after the French
revolution. Under the Jacobins, the secularized school system was given the specific task of making sure that all pupils in schools under French rule inside France or its empire came out speaking and writing Parisian French, a task that took some seventy or eighty years to realize in schools of all but a few peripheral regions, and was never finally achieved in the colonies (Ager, 1999). This was a clear case of language management as I define it. Cardinal Richelieu’s goal of uniting the multidialectal provinces of France under a Parisian king, implemented by his establishment of the Académie Française (Cooper, 1989), was taken over by the Jacobins and carried on by Napoleon and successive French governments to establish monolingualism not just in continental France but ideally in the many colonies that France came to govern during the nineteenth century. The French example, with its many government committees and agencies responsible for promoting francophonie, and its timely constitutional amendment setting French as the sole language of the Republic passed just before Maastricht when the establishment of the European Community threatened to encourage other languages, showed the nationalist language focus of these activities quite clearly. Accepting the close tie between language and nationalism, a policy that insisted on the use of a single language and that used an elaborate high-stakes examination system to achieve it was clearly an example of language management.
