English or Englishes: The Case of Language Assessment

Language testing has recently witnessed a shift from the mere dominance of inner-circle countries on English assessment toward a more variation-based assessment. The shift has established two opposing views on language assessment: Standard English perspective and World Englishes perspectives. Concerning the importance of thisconceptual shift, the present study is an attempt to investigate the attitude of Iranian testers (test developers,administerers, and raters) on this two opposing positions. To do so, a mixed-method design, including both quantitative and qualitative methods, was conducted. In the quantitative phase, a questionnaire was given to 55 Iranian languagetesters to investigate the extent World Englishes should be accounted for in English assessment. The questionnaire was developed based on five themes of language assessment introduced by Brown (2014). Moreover, semi-structured interviews were done with a group of 5 expert language testers to fortify the results. The results of the study indicated atendency toward World Englishes perspective among Iranian testers

Keywords:

World Englishes , Language Assessment , Globalization , Iranian language testers