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The Limits of Language Tests and Language Testing: Challenges and Opportunities Facing the College English Test

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English Language Education and Assessment

Abstract

Since the notion of test consequence was viewed as part of Messick’s (Validity. In: Linn RL (ed) Educational measurement, 3rd edn. American Council on Education/Macmillan, New York, pp 13–103, 1989; Language Testing 13:241–256, 1996) unified concept of test validity decades ago, the traditional view of testing has been shifting towards use-oriented testing. Consequences of test use are conceptualised as an integral part of a test’s validity. My purpose in this chapter is to discuss stakeholders’ responsibilities for the consequences of a large-scale high-stakes language test, the College English Test in China. Following Bachman and Palmer’s (Language assessment in practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) approach, I focus on the two key groups of stakeholders, the test developer and the decision-maker. It is argued that there are limits to the use of language tests for decision-making and there are limits to the power of test developers to control the use of language tests. The way forward, as suggested in Bachman and Palmer (ibid.), is for the test developer, the test user and other stakeholders to interact with each other while sharing the responsibility for building a “case” that the intended uses of the test are justified (p. 428–439).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Project 211’ was a policy initiative of the Ministry of Education in 1995. Its focus was the national top-tier universities with the intent of raising the research standards of high-level universities. China today has more than 1,700 universities, with about 100 being Project 211 universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

    Yan Jin

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  1. Yan Jin
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Correspondence to Yan Jin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Curriculum and Instruction, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong, China

    David Coniam

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Jin, Y. (2014). The Limits of Language Tests and Language Testing: Challenges and Opportunities Facing the College English Test. In: Coniam, D. (eds) English Language Education and Assessment. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-071-1_10

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