ABSTRACT
Unprecedented global migration and refugee movements, combined with local economies’ demand for foreign language expertise, increasing calls for transparency and accountability in education, advances in technology optimizing test delivery and scoring – all these developments have triggered a proliferation of language testing in the past two decades. Not only have standard proficiency tests expanded to new environments and learners, but new tests also continue to be developed.
While the pressures of the new economic reality foreground L2 users’ sociolinguistic ability to recognize important social dimensions of communication and adjust their linguistic behavior accordingly, signaling membership in a particular social group and expressing one’s identity, the focus of high-stakes tests remains, to a great extent, on general proficiency, devoid of contextual details. With a growing pool of data on linguistic variants and their social-indexical properties on the one hand, and technological advancements on the other, the task of testing L2 sociolinguistic abilities is clearly possible. Some existing L2 pragmatics tests, as well as data-collection instruments used in SLA research, can serve as a model.
This chapter briefly surveys the history of testing as it relates to L2 sociolinguistic abilities, including construct definition and operationalization, discusses key issues of present-day testing and its implications for the L2 classroom, foreign language teacher professionalization, international education, job placement, and immigration policy articulation, and concludes by identifying future directions and suggesting further readings.
