Language Assessment in Historical and Future Perspective
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LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT IN HISTORICAL AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVE
The challenge in the title that I have been assigned is daunting; if only I still had the chutzpa that I had 30 years ago when I happily divided the history of language testing into three periods (Spolsky, 1977)! Since then, having actually spent many months some 20 years later studying the history of the field (Spolsky, 1995b), I am much less confident about my ability to describe its development and quite certain that any predictions that I may make have little chance of being correct: as the Talmud points out, now that prophecy is dead, only fools and babies venture to do it. What I plan to do in this short paper is to sketch out a number of key events in the history of testing in general and language testing in particular, using them as labels for clusters of approaches to assessing human abilities that continue to show up in one form or another under varying circumstances. Because it is not always clear that a new approach is derived from an older one, I will not argue that these add up to any record of progress in the field (this was the basic flaw in my 1977 paper, where I was attempting to argue that the current approach was the best). There were influences, no doubt, but each is best seen as an adaptation to contemporary concerns and possibilities. Nor will I take the position that so many critics do: swa lengra, swa wyrs—things go on getting worse, as the bad drives out the good. In the history of testing, the Chinese Imperial examinations naturally come first, as they were the first state-wide effort to establish a testing system under centralized control. There were times during the 2000 year history of the system that the Emperor himself saw the final papers. The aim of the examination system was to winnow out of a large pool of candidates the very best who would be selected for government office as Mandarins with subsequent major financial reward. The Chinese principle, as Macaulay (1853) called it when arguing in the British Parliament for its adoption as a method of selecting cadets for the Indian Civil Service, involved a long and complex academic examination intended to test and rank a number of well-prepared candidates. It had no interest in evaluating or influencing an educational system, but its only concern was sorting and selecting the very best. While the Imperial examinations faded away even before the last of the Emperors (Franke, 1960), they had a major effect in establishing E. Shohamy and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 7: Language Testing and Assessment, 445–454. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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BERNARD SPOLSKY
a very strong (and potentially unhealthy) respect for testing in China and other countries under Chinese influence, producing continued pressure from examination systems in Japan and Korea as well as China. This first major examination may well be contrasted with the medieval Treviso test, in which the students of the school were assessed at the end of the year by r
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