30 Years on—Evolution or Revolution?

Abstract

This epilogue considers the set of articles included in the issue as a response to the question posed by Morrow (1979): Communicative language testing—Evolution or revolution? Whereas the other articles in the issue would suggest that we are in a phase of gradual evolution, with much continuity since 1980, this article argues that, on the contrary, we are facing a number of challenges to communicative language testing and the testing of languages for specific purposes. These challenges come from two principal sources: (a) the advances in technology that are making possible the automatic scoring of speech and writing, and the associated return to psycholinguistic, even structuralist, models of proficiency; and (b) the need to reflect in language test constructs and practice the reality of English as a lingua franca communication. The article considers these issues in the light of the influence of the Common European Framework of Reference in language testing, an institution that it seems is now considered “too big to fail.”

Notes

¹ The critique was originally published as Alderson (1979), but more usefully, see the republication of the paper together with an exchange with Oller in Alderson (1983).

² In fairness, Harding has elsewhere been one of the few to take seriously the challenge of ELF (Harding, 2012), and there are traces of his position in his article in this issue, where he speaks of “shuttling between different varieties” and “the development and validation of language tests which specifically assess a test-taker’s ability to deal with diverse, and potentially unfamiliar, varieties of English” (this issue, p. 194). But if this is also meant to refer to ELF communication, that reference remains implicit, and the issues specific to ELF as distinct from native varieties are not raised.