Looking Into a Crystal Ball: Is Requiring High‐Stakes Language Proficiency Tests Really Going to Improve World Language Education?

Introduction: Identity, Transdisciplinarity, and the Good Language Teacher

“…Working with two MA students, Kanno and Stuart () demonstrate how, through engaging in communities of practice, these students developed expertise in managing the challenges that emerged with being university teaching assistants. Also coming out of a broader socialization perspective on teacher identity formation and drawing on Norton's (/) work on investment has been the notion of teacher investment. Using the concept of investment and positioning theory, Reeves () analyzed the case of a secondary English teacher who negotiated his teacher identity in relation to English language learners.…”

“…Foreign language education teachers, in particular, are not immune to top‐down educational mandates that have fostered a testing culture and unleashed a trend that has yielded punitive implications for teachers who do not meet (often unrealistic) test score targets set by school districts. As demonstrated by Burke (), while recommendations made by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) aim to identify weak teachers based on their proficiency, the use of measurement tools such the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and the ACTFL Written Proficiency Test (WPT) can have detrimental effects on foreign language teachers. While Scarino (), for example, argued that overarching generic frameworks such as ACTFL are also not sufficiently sensitive to language diversity, learner backgrounds, and conditions of learning, Burke () reported on the emotional distress (agony, anxiety, and self‐doubt) encountered by student teachers.…”

“…As demonstrated by Burke (), while recommendations made by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) aim to identify weak teachers based on their proficiency, the use of measurement tools such the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and the ACTFL Written Proficiency Test (WPT) can have detrimental effects on foreign language teachers. While Scarino (), for example, argued that overarching generic frameworks such as ACTFL are also not sufficiently sensitive to language diversity, learner backgrounds, and conditions of learning, Burke () reported on the emotional distress (agony, anxiety, and self‐doubt) encountered by student teachers. The plight of teachers like them, she added, is exacerbated by the absence of personalized feedback from the company that administered the exams, and inconsistent state requirements.…”

“…Higgins and Ponte, for example, drew on the work of Gee () and McGriff () to illustrate how teacher identities were formed through validating the diverse multilingual repertoires of their students, while Zheng extended Morgan's () notion of identity‐as‐pedagogy to demonstrate how a teacher's translingual identity can be used strategically to enhance international student learning outcomes. Building on Darvin and Norton's () model of identity and investment, Stranger–Johannessen and Norton demonstrated how Ugandan primary school teachers were able to reframe what it means to be a reading teacher, while Barkhuizen invoked what he called “Norton's () classic definition of identity” to underscore how a tutor working with refugee learners was able to successfully create a respectful and constructive pedagogical space. Wolff and De Costa drew on Benesch's () notion of teacher emotions to examine the identity development of a Bangladeshi teacher as she dealt with the emotional challenges of attending graduate school in the United States, while Miller et al.…”

Online Foreign Language Education: What Are the Proficiency Outcomes?

“…In theory, assessment not only helps students evaluate their progress, but also helps teachers plan instruction and choose instructional materials, regardless of delivery mode. Understanding proficiency outcomes is even more important in language learning than in other fields, as many jobs, such as K–12 foreign language teaching, require candidates to reach Advanced Low proficiency in the target language according to the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines (Burke, ). In addition, there is natural skepticism toward online language teaching (see discussion in Blake et al., ) since most online programs provide insufficient spoken contact among learners, peers, and teachers to foster oral proficiency (Goodfellow, Manning, & Lamy, ).…”