English elsewhere: Glocalization, assessment and ethics

This paper explores standardized English curriculum practice in a globalizing world. It uses one particular site of formative/summative assessment to show how colonial and modernist trajectories are carried in these times. The argument is that an ethical evaluative practice would allow for local hybridizations. To represent and theorize from a locally-situated account of cultural globalization, a consideration of teaching and assessment of English (in Norway) deals with homogenizing effects. Thus, the paper considers how Englishes elsewhere might vary within given contexts of difference and today's complex immigrations and diasporas. This would call for a reflexive reshaping of the evaluation of English in non-Anglo locations. Specifically, it would request that local differences be recognized by teachers and examiners as concrete manifestations of new forms of globalization or glocalization. In these ways, students and teachers would act more as agents of globalization than as its objects.