Susy Macqueen

Language assessment constructs conjoin two complex, dynamic phenomena: (1) collective patterns of language use and (2) individual, language ability. Assessment constructs emerge from “spheres of activity” across multiple, overlapping dimensions, denoted in this chapter as theoretical, operationalized, stated and perceived constructs. While theoretical constructs are assumptions about what causes differences in scores, the operationalised construct is what actually emerges in the interaction between the assessee and the assessment infrastructure. Stated constructs are descriptions of what the assessment claims to assess and perceived constructs are the ways these statements are interpreted. Interrogating the congruence of these dimensions has the potential to provide a holistic view of the development, experience, use and impact of assessment constructs across diverse stakeholder worlds.

This chapter explores how L2 academic writers imitate adaptively as they manage the need to communicate academic content using language that aligns with the predictable patterns of the discourse community. Evidence from two studies of L2 writing is combined to explore how writers work with a dynamic store of language chunks as their emergent building blocks. One study, a cross-sectional discourse analysis of the writing of 480 test-takers (Knoch, Macqueen, & O’Hagan, 2014), investigates formulaicity and source text use in two writing tasks. The other, a longitudinal qualitative case study of a student writer (Macqueen, 2012), takes a close-up view of her word combinations and use of source texts as she revises an assignment. Taken together, the findings suggest that the early stages of L2 academic writing are characterized by greater reliance on verbatim imitation of the patterns of others and less formulaicity. Over time, L2 writers represent academic content through interweaving the words of others with their own internalized patterns in increasingly conventional manipulations.

Drawing upon a convergence of sociocultural theory and linguistic emergentism, this book presents a longitudinal investigation of the development of ESL users' written lexicogrammatical patterning (collocations and colligations). A qualitative methodology (‘Lexical Trail Analysis’) was developed in order to capture a dynamic and historical view of the ways in which the participants combined words in their writing. This involved tracing single lexemes diachronically through individuals’ written corpora. The writers were interviewed about the histories of particular word combinations. Selected patterns were later tested using the principles of dynamic testing. The findings of these combined data types – essays, interviews and tests – suggest that sociocognitive resources such as memory and attention and the ability to imitate and adapt linguistic resources are paramount in the massive task of internalizing the lexi-cogrammatical patterning of a second language. The participants were agents of change, seeking assistance and adapting patterns to suit their changing goals. Their activity is theorized in a model of language patterning from which implications for second language learning and teaching are drawn.

Language is fundamental to teaching and learning, yet is prone to invisibility in education systems. Drawing on work from applied linguistics that foregrounds language use in education, a “power” heuristic can be used to highlight linguistic privilege and its implications for students and their individual language repertoires. Language can be understood as a tool for performing particular interpersonal and ideational functions; its structure and uses are determined by context. For most students, experiences of language that is education-related reside in three core domains: the home and community, the school, and the nation state. Language expectations in these domains vary and position the linguistic repertoires of students differently. A key consideration is the student’s first language and its relationship to the expectations and privileged varieties of different institutions, for example, the local school and the national education department. By foregrounding linguistic privile...

English language proficiency is a deciding factor in the life opportunities of many thousands of applicants for Australian skilled migration every year. This paper focuses on the perspectives of professional bodies that use English language tests in their decisions. Taking an interpretative approach, we explore the meanings that policy makers from these organisations ascribe (as score users) to test standards (cut-scores) so that we can better understand the uses of test scores in migration policy. The policy narratives we observed around the use of test scores describe the need to manage large numbers of applicants, to assure a level of English proficiency for high-risk professional communications, to provide an objective assessment that is separate from any assessment of professional competence and to maintain consistency of standards with other bodies. These views are contextualised with other relevant information, particularly that available from test providers, who are key players in the test-using interpretive community. We observe that particular tests and their standards become trusted and entrenched in policy, using the apparently simple semiotics of scores. Concomitantly, trust in tests is nurtured by test marketing. These tendencies warrant attention from test researchers, providers and score users.

Language is fundamental to teaching and learning, yet is prone to invisibility in education systems. Drawing on work from applied linguistics that foregrounds language use in education, a “power” heuristic can be used to highlight linguistic privilege and its implications for students and their individual language repertoires. Language can be understood as a tool for performing particular interpersonal and ideational functions; its structure and uses are determined by context. For most students, experiences of language that is education-related reside in three core domains: the home and community, the school, and the nation state. Language expectations in these domains vary and position the linguistic repertoires of students differently. A key consideration is the student’s first language and its relationship to the expectations and privileged varieties of different institutions, for example, the local school and the national education department. By foregrounding linguistic privilege in education, the alignment, or misalignment, between students’ language resources and the prevailing language norms of educational institutions is made visible and open to change. Inherent in the level of alignment are issues of educational inclusion, access to powerful language forms and genres, and academic achievement. The concept of power affordances can be used to refer to the enabling potential of the relationship between language status, language affiliation and a student’s linguistic repertoire. Power affordances can operate as three broad potentials, capabilities or statuses: socioeconomic power, which resides in the language of global and state institutions ranging from government to schools and manifests in instruments such as national standardized tests; sociocognitive power, which enables the capacity to learn and recognizes the language intensity of knowledge; and identity power, which references social belonging and is strongly indexed to language. Conceptualizing language and its power affordances in education provides a useful framework for understanding the relationship between students’ language resources and the often implicit linguistic demands and practices of education systems. It also highlights the rich potential of applied linguistics in understanding education.

With an increasingly mobile global workforce, English language proficiency has become a sought-after commodity in workplaces across the world. This has given rise to the need for English-language assessments in both English as a lingua franca contexts as well as in traditionally English-speaking countries, which are increasingly relying on an overseas migrant workforce. There have been two main reasons for the increased use of such assessments: firstly, there are several professions in which insufficient English language proficiency is seen as a safety risk (e.g. medicine and aviation) necessitating policies such as minimum language requirements. Secondly, the widespread view held by employers that graduates are entering the workplace without the English language competence required to transition into the labour market. In this chapter, we will begin with a historical overview of languages for specific purposes (LSP) testing. We then provide a definition and classification scheme of tests falling under this umbrella, and we examine the construct of LSP tests and detail key examples. Finally, we discuss issues in assessing languages for professional purposes and suggest avenues for future research.

Objects that sit between intersecting social worlds, such as Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) tests, are boundary objects – dynamic, historically derived mechanisms which maintain coherence between
worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989). They emerge initially from sociopolitical mandates, such as the need to ensure a safe and efficient workforce or to control immigration, and they develop into standards (i.e. stabilized classifying mechanisms). In this article, we explore the concept of LSP test as boundary object through a qualitative case study of the Occupational English Test (OET), a test which assesses the English proficiency of healthcare professionals who wish to practise in English-speaking healthcare contexts. Stakeholders with different types of vested interest in the test were interviewed (practising doctors and nurses who have taken the test, management staff, professional board representatives) to capture multiple perspectives of both the test-taking experience and the relevance of the test to the workplace. The themes arising from the accumulated stakeholder perceptions depict a ‘boundary object’ that encompasses a work-readiness level of language proficiency on the one hand and aspects of communication skills for patient-centred care on the other. We argue that the boundary object
metaphor is useful in that it represents a negotiation over the adequacy and effects of a test standard for all vested social worlds. Moreover, the test should benefit the worlds it interconnects, not just in terms of the impact on the learning opportunities it offers candidates, but also the impact such learning carries into key social sites, such as healthcare workplaces.

Academic English programs are popular pathways into English-medium university courses across the world. A typical program design hinges on an established university entrance standard, e.g. IELTS 6.5, and extrapolates the timing and structure of the pathway stages in relation to the test standard. The general principle is that the course assessments substitute for the test standard so that successful completion of the course is considered equivalent to achieving the minimum test standard for university entrance. This study reports on an evaluation of such course assessments at a major Australian university. The evaluation undertook to determine the appropriateness of the exit standard in relation to an independent measure of academic English ability. It also explored the suitability of the course final assessments used to produce measures in relation to that standard: by investigating the robustness of the processes and instruments and their appropriateness in relation to the course and the target academic domain. The evaluation was revealing about the difficult relationship between best practice in achievement testing in academic English pathway programs and external proficiency test standards. Using the sociological concept of 'boundary object' worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989), we suggest that program evaluations that arise from a specific institutional concern for meeting adequate language standards can be informative about interactions between assessments in use.

Communication in emergency departments (EDs), often between several health professionals and patients and relatives, is a major cause of patient complaint and error; however, communication-skills teaching for medical students largely focuses on individual clinician-patient interactions. We developed and implemented an evidence-informed online resource, Communication for Health in Emergency Contexts (CHEC; http://www.chec.meu.medicine.unimelb.edu.au/resources) to raise medical students' awareness of the challenges of communication in the ED, and to provide students with communication strategies for addressing these challenges. The foundation of the CHEC resource was the findings and data from a large research project conducted at five emergency departments in Australia over the period 2006-2009. From this, we developed ED scenarios and teaching vignettes using authentic communication data. The project included a nationwide medical curriculum scoping phase, involving interviews with medical students and educators, on ED communication curriculum needs in order to inform the educational activities. The CHEC resource provides students with the opportunity to follow real-life scenarios through all stages of the ED journey, whereas insights from ED medical and nursing staff provide learning opportunities about interprofessional communication for medical students. Evaluation suggests that students find the resource useful, and that the resource has been successfully embedded in medical and junior doctor training on communication and quality and safety. The CHEC resource enhances the capacity of busy clinical educators to raise students' awareness of the communication needs of emergency health care by focusing on communication in high-stress, time-pressured settings using a web format. The CHEC resource provides students with the opportunity to follow real-life scenarios through all stages of the ED journey.

Complex Systems Theory (CST) has been called upon in many different fields as a means of examining phenomena in a way that makes interconnectivity and emergence central to research. For applied linguistics, CST offers the possibility of encompassing both language and learning. In doing so, the theoretical orientation needs to be fully integrated into the research process through research methodology. This paper describes a qualitative microethnographic method, Lexical Trail Analysis, which draws on the concept of emergence. It is an analytic method that enables us to see the longitudinal development of words and their patterns. It is applied here in a case study of the development of one second language user's lexicogrammatical patterns (formulaic sequences, collocations, idioms, etc.). Her word patterns are traced as she prepares for a university entrance test and later, once she enters the university. Her use of patterns involves adaptive imitation, a complex process of perceiving, imitating and adapting patterns to suit new communicative goals.

Aims: To scope communication skills teaching in the emergency rotation by examining the literature, current practices and the perceptions of medical educators and students. The scoping will inform the development of an integrated clinical communication program for medical student emergency rotations in Australia. Background: Communication problems in emergency settings are a major cause of complaint and poor patient outcomes. While communication skills teaching is now a core component of medical undergraduate curricula, this often occurs in non-clinical settings. Separating the teaching of communication skills from the clinical setting can emphasise the effect of the hidden curriculum; neglecting students' communication skills training in emergency settings could have implications for patient safety and health. Methods: There were three components to the scoping study: a review of the literature, a survey of Australian medical schools to investigate teaching and assessment of communication skills, and focus group interviews with students who had completed their emergency rotation and with emergency medicine clinical teachers. Results: There are few papers describing programs teaching emergency communication skills. Communication skills education is a core requirement in all Australian medical schools; however, no school conducts specific communication skills teaching in emergency medicine. Medical students were engaged with the 'hands on' clinical aspects of the rotation and some considered that "communication can come by osmosis". Conclusions: There is substantial justification for integrating communication skills teaching in the emergency rotation of medical students. While communication skills teaching in emergency medicine is beginning to receive attention internationally, it remains underdeveloped in Australia.

Abstract: In 2002 the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES) implemented a revised version of the Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE). CPE, which is the highest level of the Main Suite of Cambridge ESOL exams, comprises five modules," ...