Has English been increasingly tested as an international language? Evidence from 1956–2016

Abstract

ABSTRACTA previous study (Ke, I. 2012. From EFL to English as an international and scientific language: analysing Taiwan’s high-school English textbooks in the period 1952–2009. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 25(2), 173–187) on the trend of English textbooks in Taiwanese high schools showed that the proportion of the lessons embedded in Anglo-American cultures decreases in the 1990s along with the globalisation trend while the proportions of local and intercultural lessons increase after the 2000s. The general trend corresponds to the changing role of English becoming an international language. To further confirm the trend, the current study examines whether the cultural trend observed in high school English textbooks can also be found in the college entrance exams in Taiwan. The total number of exams examined is 85, dating from 1956 to 2016. The results show that the cultural contexts did shift in the similar vein as found in the textbook study. The proportions of Anglo-American cultures gradually decreased from the 1990s while those of international cultures appeared more often after the 2000s. Questions based on the local culture started to appear from the late 1980s, but the percentages fluctuate and decrease recently. The overall findings suggest that English has been gradually tested as an international language, but not as a local language in the local college entrance exam.