Abstract:
As applied linguists, an important part of
our work constitutes the design of language
courses, language tests and sometimes even language policies. Clearly, these applied
linguistic artefacts, especially language tests (which are the focus of this article) have
far-reaching, sometimes negative, effects on our students. As applied linguists what is
there in the literature on language testing to guide the work we do, to ensure that our
designs have some positive effect? What have the experts in the field of language testing
presented us with to ensure that important questions related to the social dimension in
testing (issues related to transparency, integrity, accountability, fairness and ethics) are
not ignored in the design and administration of language tests? What this article will
attempt to do is to show that questions about the social dimension of language testing
cannot be adequately answered by Messick (1980; 1989a; 1989b), a conventionally
accepted expert in the field. Instead these questions can be answered in a “third
idea, other than validity” (Weideman 2009: 239), as outlined by Weideman, an idea
that does not foreground one concept but rather identifies a number of fundamental
considerations for language testing.
