Social Justice in Language Assessment

Abstract

This chapter explores the underlying social justice agenda in the Celpe-Bras exam based on the assessment of the intercultural communicative competence in one of the exam's tasks. The premises are that assessment exerts great power in people's lives, and therefore, language assessment should help diminish social inequalities, not reinforce them. Intercultural communicative competence raises issues of socially constructed and dialogically negotiated identity markers and can therefore be considered one of the pillars of social justice language education. The Celpe-Bras exam is supported by a construct based on language as social practice, meaning it can propose tasks and assessment rubrics with great potential for promoting social justice. As language and culture are taken as inseparable, producing texts (output) in a given language is a movement of mobilizing and articulating cultural background knowledge with the information presented in the source texts (input).