The Limits of Language Tests and Language Testing: Challenges and Opportunities Facing the College English Test

Since the notion of test consequence was viewed as part of Messick’s (Validity. In: Linn RL (ed) Educational measurement, 3rd edn. American Council on Education/Macmillan, New York, pp 13–103, 1989; Language Testing 13:241–256, 1996) unified concept of test validity decades ago, the traditional view of testing has been shifting towards use-oriented testing. Consequences of test use are conceptualised as an integral part of a test’s validity. My purpose in this chapter is to discuss stakeholders’ responsibilities for the consequences of a large-scale high-stakes language test, the College English Test in China. Following Bachman and Palmer’s (Language assessment in practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) approach, I focus on the two key groups of stakeholders, the test developer and the decision-maker. It is argued that there are limits to the use of language tests for decision-making and there are limits to the power of test developers to control the use of language tests. The way forward, as suggested in Bachman and Palmer (ibid.), is for the test developer, the test user and other stakeholders to interact with each other while sharing the responsibility for building a “case” that the intended uses of the test are justified (p. 428–439).