Ethics, Professionalism, Rights and Codes
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ETHICS, PROFESSIONALISM, RIGHTS AND CODES
INTRODUCTION
The chapter considers various definitions of a profession and examines the claims of language testing to professional status. Against the traditional professions of law and medicine, language testing’s claims are not strong. However, what it can do is to publish its commitment to ethics by means of a Code of Ethics. This provides for accountability both to members of the profession and to its stakeholders. This drive to accountability, to make its principles and practices explicit, explains the emphasis given in the language testing literature to the role of standards, both as goals and as the criteria for evaluating language testing procedures. It also explains the concern in the profession to uphold individual rights, especially those of test-takers. The chapter accepts that both professionalism and Codes of Ethics can be used improperly for face-saving ends and raises the question of how far issues to do with ethics, professionalism, rights and codes can be subsumed under the overall concepts of reliability and validity. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T : P R O F E S S I O N S
Max Weber (Gerth and Mills 1948) contrasted professions with bureaucracy, seeing in professions the paradigm form of collegiate activity in which rational power is based on representative democracy and leaders in principle are first among equals. Fullwinder provides the following criteria for a profession: 1. It is a performance for public good 2. It contains special knowledge and training 3. It deals mainly with people who for different reasons are especially vulnerable and dependent in their relationship to the practice of the professional (1996, p. 73) Such criteria are readily applicable to the traditional professions of law and medicine, which explains Fullwinder’s further comment that what distinguishes a profession from, say, a business is its primary concern with public good; this is to say “that doctors and lawyers do
E. Shohamy and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 7: Language Testing and Assessment, 429–443. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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A L A N D AV I E S
not exploit . . . vulnerability, but help persons overcome serious threats to their health and rights constitutes the great public good of the two professions” (1996, pp. 73, 74). And he suggests that whether or not an activity meets the criteria for a profession may be determined by completing the following schema: “The profession of . . . serves the . . . needs of persons” ( p. 74). Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary of the English Language (1994 edition) defines a profession as a calling. This primary definition ‘a calling’ alerts us to the derivation of profession: “professing, to profess: to commit oneself < profiteri, to declare publicly, to own or confess freely, to give evidence and thus to avow, in particular to declare oneself to be something (a friend, a philosopher, a physician, a teacher) entailing a pledge of capacity to fulfil the unde
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