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In parallel with an increased focus on border security in immigration and citizenship policy in the UK (the so-called ‘hostile environment’ policy), Government-approved English language tests for visa and immigration purposes were officially labelled ‘Secure English Language Tests’ (SELTs) in 2010. The proximity of security concerns in language testing with broader national immigration policy objectives suggests a complex role for language tests as gatekeeping devices. This article draws on critical discourse studies to explore this issue. Documents provided in the 2014 tender round for selecting Secure English Language Tests (acquired through a Freedom of Information request) were analysed through a discourse-historical lens (Reisigl and Wodak 2016) to map salient topics and identify discursive strategies used to construct ‘secure English language testing’. Findings show that security is a prominent topic in the tender; prospective bidders are required to meet detailed security requirements and to police subcontractors, and social actors, spaces, objects, policies and procedures are routinely described in securitized terms. Implications are drawn for understanding the role of language tests within broader securitization processes.

Interdisciplinarity has been a core tenet of critical discourse studies—a group of approaches to the analysis of texts in their social contexts—since its inception, in what may be seen as a reaction against the sometimes staid and rigid disciplinary boundaries of linguistics and other disciplines. Interdisciplinarity has also been seen as necessarily accompanying analyses of complex social problems such as racism, sexism or other forms of discrimination and social domination. The concept has been multiply re-examined, challenged and reaffirmed by critical discourse scholars (for instance, in Weiss and Wodak, 2003), and the present article continues this work by mapping out the present-day dimensions of interdisciplinarity in different approaches to critical discourse studies. It also attempts to juxtapose these various disciplinary developments, and consider whether interdisciplinarity in and of itself has come to be taken for granted. Finally, it raises questions about whether the move away from an emphasis on the analysis of social wrongs within some of the newer approaches to critical discourse studies may in time lead to a disciplinary schism, or whether the increasingly disciplinary nature of critical discourse studies itself may have become a problem. This article forms part of an ongoing thematic collection dedicated to the concept of interdisciplinarity.