Framework to accumulate validity evidence for intended and actual consequences of Korean language proficiency testing

Abstract

Korea is rapidly becoming a multicultural society. As the notion of purity in ethnic bloodline has long been a requisite for ‘Koreanness’, however, the cultural nationalist identity seems to be maintained on proficiency levels tested by the most powerful, government-instituted Korean language test, TOPIK (Test of Proficiency in Korean). Research on immigrants’ language practices, ideologies and (language) testing requirements has been bleak in Korean contexts, and this article proposes one such framework by combining critical discursive approaches and contemporary argument-based approaches to validation to evaluate a newly developed test, TOPIK-speaking, and related policy issues. Drawing on Shohamy’s critical language testing (CLT), Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA), and Bachman and Palmer’s assessment use argument (AUA), it illustrates the unique features of a validation framework and uses TOPIK-speaking as an example to collect and evaluate empirical evidence for its intended and actual consequences. The practice of testing consequences should be discursively analysed as a multilayered phenomenon, reinforced by discursive conflicts, such as represented in the media.