Evaluating the logic of a policy-driven national language test in Indonesia: A critical discursive investigation of the Test of Indonesian Proficiency (UKBI)

Abstract

This study examines the Test of Indonesian Proficiency (Uji Kemahiran Berbahasa Indonesia [UKBI]), a national language test developed by the Indonesian government’s language planning agency, Badan Bahasa, and promoted for various uses across education, employment, and immigration domains. This is illustrative of broader trends; language tests, like UKBI, have become integral to policy agendas and can serve multiple social and political purposes, many extending well beyond test design intentions. Research is urgently needed to examine how government agencies and other test users rationalize the need for and the legitimacy of policy-based test uses, as a means of promoting public acceptance and support, particularly where an empirical basis for test uses is lacking. We address this by identifying claims made by Badan Bahasa about UKBI scores, uses and consequences across policy documents, media releases, and website materials. We then combine Van Leeuwen’s language of legitimation framework and Reisigl and Wodak’s discourse historical approach to critically examine the discursive strategies engaged by Badan Bahasa to promote the legitimacy of the UKBI and its uses. The study sheds light on the social values and ideologies underlying testing practices, providing new insights into how tests as policy instruments come to be imbued with meaning and authority

Keywords

Bahasa Indonesia critical discourse analysis language planning language policy policy-driven testing social values UKBI

Introduction

The intrinsically social and political nature of language testing practices, along with their far-reaching social impacts, is now widely recognized. This is reflected in a growing body of research in the field examining the discourses and ideologies underlying policy-embedded test uses (e.g. Harding et al., 2020; Macqueen & Ryan, 2019; Shin, 2024). It is also evident in calls for policy-level aims and consequences to be included in validity arguments and research agendas (Chalhoub-Deville, 2016; Chalhoub-Deville & O’Sullivan, 2020; Knoch & Macqueen, 2020; O’Sullivan & Chalhoub-Deville, 2021), as well as for enhanced policy literacy on the part of language testers (Deygers et al., 2021).

These developments have emerged amid a growing trend toward high-stakes and increasingly distal uses of language tests (Chalhoub-Deville, 2016) in a growing number of countries and for disparate purposes across various policy domains, including education, employment, immigration, and citizenship, among others. Shohamy (1998) was early in raising critical awareness of tests as “both a product and an agent of cultural, social, political, educational and ideological agendas” (p. 332). Shohamy (2001) and McNamara and Roever (2006) further note that the power of tests derives from widely held public trust in testing as a means of generating objective “truths” about individuals. These early insights have informed critical research into the uses of language tests as policy instruments, notably for immigration and citizenship purposes. In anglophone countries, for example, scholars have argued that such testing can function to legitimize racist sentiment and promote exclusion, further marginalizing minority language identities (e.g. Hamid et al., 2019; Khan, 2019; Kunnan, 2018; Schissel & Khan, 2021). In the context of these and other examples of policy-driven language testing, as Knoch (2021) points out, robust empirical backing for score interpretations and uses, of the kind imagined by language testers, is rarely sought by policy makers and other test users. Instead, as Macqueen and Ryan (2019) suggest, tests “become reified as a solution, and as a result, the truth-value of the [policy] problem space is reinforced” (p. 68).

In the Indonesian context, which is the focus of the current paper, this trend toward “all-purpose” language testing is exemplified by the newly revised national language proficiency test, Uji Kemahiran Berbahasa Indonesia (UKBI), which translates as the Test of Proficiency in Indonesian. This state-led test was first officially developed and administered in a paper-based format in 2003 by the Indonesian government’s language planning agency, Badan Bahasa, which operates under the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture. In early 2021, Badan Bahasa introduced an Internet-based version of the test, the UKBI Adaptive Merdeka, and has since been actively promoting the test for a wide range of high-stakes purposes across different domains. Recommended uses of the UKBI now include, for example, for graduation purposes and for allocation of educational scholarships in higher education, for employment purposes such as screening job applicants, granting promotion, and civil servant recruitment, and for immigration purposes including verifying the language proficiency of foreign students and workers in Indonesia, and granting visas and work permits (Ministry of Education Regulation No. 70/2016 on Indonesian Proficiency Standards).

In response, there has been a rapid and substantial increase in the number of test-takers in recent years; in 2019, the number stood at 14,718, and by 2022, this figure had already risen to 284,819 (Sholihah, 2022, p. 9). Notably, there is little publicly available information (and no published studies) to date concerning how the test was developed, nor about how test quality has so far been examined and verified. Nonetheless, rapidly rising test-taker numbers suggest that the test and its proposed policy uses are quickly gaining widespread acceptance. The UKBI context is, of course, not exceptional. International English tests have long been promoted, if without being explicitly endorsed, for a range of policy purposes that extend beyond test design intentions, including for regulating skilled and other forms of migration, for which validation efforts remain notably absent (Fulcher, 2015; O’Sullivan & Chalhoub-Deville, 2021). As is the case across numerous other national contexts where language tests are increasingly used to realize various social and political agendas, this expanding UKBI regime is likely to have significant consequences for individuals, institutions, and the Indonesian society, especially as the scale of testing continues to grow. There is thus an urgent need to understand and critically interrogate the ways in which governments and other test users rationalize the need for testing and garner public support for language test uses for diverse policy purposes, especially where empirical backing is lacking.

The current study addresses this need by first identifying the various claims made by Badan Bahasa, as both policy maker and test developer, about the UKBI scores, uses, and consequences across policy documents, media releases, and website materials. We then combine Van Leeuwen’s (2007) language of legitimation framework and Reisigl and Wodak’s (2016) discourse historical approach (DHA) to critically examine the discursive strategies engaged by Badan Bahasa to promote the legitimacy of the test and its range of proposed uses in the Indonesian context. Our paper thereby builds on recent work interrogating the discourses through which tests and the purposes they serve come to be imbued with meaning and authority (Harding et al., 2020; Macqueen & Ryan, 2019; Shin, 2024), while offering novel insights into ways in which national language testing regimes are communicated as legitimate, “all-purpose” policy instruments, through their alignment with discourses of social values.

Communicating language testing: Critical discourse analysis and the social and political dimensions of testing

An interrogation of the social and political dimensions of testing calls for theory and methods outside those typically used in our field, perhaps explaining, as some have suggested, a scarcity of research (e.g. Kunnan, 2018; McNamara, 2005; McNamara & Ryan, 2011). In this regard, critical discourse analysis (CDA) offers productive concepts and analytical tools, particularly those focused on legitimacy and legitimation strategies (Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 1998), which have the potential to broaden ways of addressing questions of social values and of shedding light on the rationalities that support policy-driven language testing, as set out below.

While various theoretical orientations exist within CDA, there is a general consensus among scholars (e.g., Fairclough, 2001; Reisigl & Wodak, 2016; Wodak, 2011) that CDA involves a focus on relations of power, including how discursive strategies actualize dominant ideologies and social hierarchies. CDA offers conceptual and analytical tools to identify and critically examine discursive practices, which have already been applied to examine the ideological roles language testing plays in policy contexts (e.g., Harding et al., 2020). In contexts where details of test design and development work are available for scrutiny, CDA also provides a means of integrating questions of ideologies into validation frameworks, as shown by Shin (2024). Shin combines Bachman and Palmer’s (2010) Assessment Use Argument with a CDA approach to examine the planning, implementation, and subsequent abandonment of a policy-driven English test in Korea, the National English Ability Test (NEAT). Shin argues that a CDA approach to validation can enable language testers to understand and negotiate representations of test constructs, uses, and impacts in public discourses, the latter of which influence policy directions. In the context of public concerns over the impacts of NEAT in Korea, he laments that such engagement could have enabled language testers to adjust test design and counter negative perceptions, which led to a sudden policy shift to abandon the test, entailing a substantial waste of test development resources.

Legitimacy and legitimation: Validity as critical discursive practice

While Shin (2024) adopted a broad CDA approach to examine how consequences were represented in public discourses surrounding NEAT, here we focus specifically on themes of legitimacy and legitimation (Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 1998), which we argue have particular relevance to problems of policy-driven testing, especially in the absence of formal test design and development documentation, and especially in the absence of explicit theoretical and/or empirical backing for proposed test uses. Legitimation refers to the use of discourse to create perceptions of positive, beneficial, ethical, and acceptable actions within specific contexts and in relation to institutional practices (van Dijk, 1998; Van Leeuwen, 2007; Van Leeuwen, 2008; Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999). Applied to language testing, legitimation strategies serve as discursive tools employed by powerful stakeholders (e.g., test developers, policy makers, test users) to explicitly and/or implicitly address questions such as “why should the test exist?” and “why should a test be accepted and trusted for particular purposes?.” To address these “why” questions, social actors tend to use discursive legitimation strategies through, among other things, appeals to impersonal authority of law or tradition, personal authority of important figures, emotions, a hypothetical future, and idealized future goals and effects of policies (Hansson & Page, 2022; Reyes, 2011; Van Leeuwen, 2007; Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999).

Legitimacy-related questions are highly relevant to the field of language testing, considering the widespread public acceptance and trust of tests (Shohamy, 2001). Macqueen and Ryan (2019) highlight that as policy problems and political anxieties shift and change, language tests are increasingly viewed as a fixed, viable solution, and in some ways, they argue, it is through the presence of a test as solution that all kinds of policy concerns come to be understood as problems of language. Macqueen et al. (2021) thus assert that the language testing industry, especially test developers, bear responsibility for ensuring that understandings and uses of test scores are grounded in evidence of construct-relevance or of suitability for purpose, instead of simply promoting legitimacy through marketing and reputation (see also Knoch & Macqueen, 2024). This sentiment is echoed in Winke’s (2024) call for Open Science practices to be adopted in the field, to enable equitable access to language testing knowledge and validation research. However, in examples of more distal policy uses of tests, as already pointed out, this responsibility is rarely fulfilled (Chalhoub-Deville, 2016; Fulcher, 2015). An interrogation of the ways in which test developers and test users communicate and legitimize their assessment products and uses of test scores, thus far under-explored, is urgently needed, not only as a means of holding powerful stakeholders to account but also to promote informed public debate concerning language tests and the extent to which they can and should be used to achieve policy ends.

The UKBI as a policy-driven test: The social and political context in Indonesia

Testing within reform-driven systems is intended to “effect fundamental and encompassing changes at the individual, group, and societal levels” (Chalhoub-Deville & O’Sullivan, 2020, p. 142). Such testing is thus designed to produce effects that invariably extend beyond the individual or group-level score interpretation and use claims encompassed by traditional validation frameworks (Chalhoub-Deville, 2016). It is worth noting that while the newly revised UKBI is not explicitly embedded into a specific reform policy, the test can be seen as part of a wider reform-driven apparatus operating in Indonesia, as set out below, directed toward enhancing modernization and internationalization across many domains, especially education and work.

Badan Bahasa, as already mentioned, operates under the Ministry of Education and Culture, and the decision to redevelop and launch the revised UKBI in 2021 aligned closely with the Ministry’s broader reform agenda, which began in 2019. One of the major reforms was the introduction of a new school curriculum, Kurikulum Merdeka (the Freedom or Emancipated Curriculum), which was intended to enhance the integration of technology in teaching and learning, and lift literacy levels across the country, particularly in light of Indonesia’s historically low rankings in international assessments like the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The renewed UKBI, which covers the four language skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing, in addition to knowledge of Indonesian language rules, reflects these national educational objectives through its adaptive format and integration of technology with language and literacy development. Moreover, the branding “UKBI Adaptive Merdeka” links it directly to the Kurikulum Merdeka vision.

The UKBI can also be situated in the context of the Indonesian government’s long-term ambition to internationalize Bahasa Indonesia, a goal articulated in several policies, including Law No. 24/2009 and the Ministry of Education and Culture’s Regulation No. 42/2018. Particularly in recent years, the Indonesian government has actively pursued efforts to elevate Bahasa Indonesia’s global presence (Nasrullah, 2024), and this initiative is a central objective for both Badan Bahasa and the Ministry of Education and Culture (Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 2020). In 2023, UNESCO recognized Bahasa Indonesia as an official language, marking a significant milestone, as the government continues to actively lobby for Bahasa Indonesia’s status as a lingua franca or second language within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN; Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 2022). In this context, Indonesian for Foreign Speakers programs have become a high priority in domains of both higher education and employment in Indonesia. There has been growing national discourse around the internationalization of Indonesian higher education, with a focus on attracting international students—a trend that is already showing positive growth (Lamb et al., 2021). Emphasizing a need for these students to demonstrate Indonesian language proficiency, Badan Bahasa has expanded efforts to promote the UKBI within university contexts, and several prominent Indonesian universities now offer UKBI preparation courses specifically for international students (IPB University, 2024).

In parallel, Indonesia has seen a notable increase in foreign workers in recent years, with a 26.36% rise in 2022 alone (Sadya, 2023). This has been driven largely by the ASEAN Economic Community program, which promotes free movement of skilled labor, liberalized trade, and investment within ASEAN nations (Corong & Aguiar, 2019; Ishikawa, 2021). In this context, the Bahasa Indonesia proficiency requirements for foreign workers have been heavily debated. Consistent with national language policies (e.g., Law No. 24/2009), a requirement had been in place for foreign workers to demonstrate basic communicative skills in Bahasa Indonesia through the UKBI, but this was overturned in 2015 by the Ministry of Manpower, with support from President Jokowi, citing concerns that a test requirement could discourage investment and harm Indonesia’s business climate (Maharani & Hidayat, 2015). Critics of the relaxed language requirements have warned that worker competence and public safety will be compromised, and that the symbolic presence of Bahasa Indonesia will be weakened, leading in turn to an erosion of national identity (Maryanto, 2022).

This debate reflects the complex and somewhat insecure position of Bahasa Indonesia within Indonesia’s sociolinguistic landscape (see Zein, 2020) and provides insights into the value-driven, ideological roles the UKBI could potentially serve. With 600 different ethnic groups speaking over 700 languages and more than 1100 dialects, Indonesia ranks second globally in terms of linguistic diversity (Frederick & Worden, 2011). As the language used to foster a national consciousness and solidarity among diverse ethnolinguistic groups during the struggle against colonial powers, Bahasa Indonesia has long occupied top status in the national language hierarchy. The prestige of the language has been further reinforced by policies like Law No. 24/2009 that mandate its use across various public domains. Nevertheless, its status faces increasing pressure within Indonesia’s linguistic ecology. While earning the label “killer language” (Mühlhäusler, 1996) due to its role in language endangerment, some also see Bahasa Indonesia as being “devoured” by English, especially while contending with language-mixing practices (Coleman, 2016; Sugiharto, 2015), such as bahasa gaul (Smith-Hefner, 2009) and bahasa gado-gado (Martin-Anatias, 2018). This competition between languages is especially pronounced in education, where there are ongoing tensions between offering instruction in Indonesian, promoting mother tongue education for language maintenance, and enhancing proficiency in globally significant languages (Zein, 2019). This pressure has created an impetus to reassert and solidify the image, status, function, and usage of Bahasa Indonesia and points to the values behind recent moves to reinvigorate the UKBI and increasingly promote its use across various domains.

The current study

As outlined in the introduction, the aim of this study was to identify claims made by Badan Bahasa about UKBI scores, uses, and consequences, and to critically examine the discursive strategies engaged to cultivate legitimacy and trust in the test and its proposed uses. Specifically, we address the following main research questions (RQs):

RQ1. What claims are made and/or implied by Badan Bahasa about the scores, uses, and consequences of the UKBI?

RQ2. What discursive strategies and/or ideological discourses are drawn upon to legitimize the UKBI test and its intended uses and consequences?

Methods

A search of publicly available, test-related documents was conducted by the first author, which involved a comprehensive online search across multiple repositories, including Google Scholar, relevant journals, and key government websites such as the Ministry of Education (https://www.kemdikbud.go.id/main/) and Badan Bahasa (https://badanbahasa.kemdikbud.go.id/), using primary keywords “Uji Kemahiran Berbahasa Indonesia” and its abbreviation “UKBI.” This search yielded 50 documents (all in Bahasa Indonesia), including three official policy documents (documents 1–3 in the reporting of results), and 47 documents produced by the language planning agency, Badan Bahasa, including six UKBI test resources documents (documents 4–9, which include technical manuals, proficiency scales, and test-taker guides), two UKBI conference proceedings (documents 10–11), and 39 online UKBI-related official media releases (documents 12–50). A full list of documents used as data is provided as Supplemental Material.

To address RQ1, the first author, with Bahasa Indonesia as a first language, a Bachelor degree in English language education (including formal training in translation), a Master of Applied Linguistics (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), and previous professional experience as an English translator at one of the top public universities in Indonesia, read all documents line by line and identified and extracted segments that presented claims and/or support of claims related to test scores, uses, and consequences. The same author then manually translated relevant segments into English, a process which included an initial literal translation to preserve semantic accuracy, followed by contextual adaptation to ensure clarity and coherence in English, and iterative checking over multiple passes to ensure original meanings were preserved (no machine translation or generative artificial intelligence tools were used). Both authors worked to code the dataset, discussing disagreements until consensus was reached. To begin, claims made by Badan Bahasa about the test were identified and then categorized in terms of inferences in an argument-based validation framework, as set out by Xi and Sawaki (2017): (1) domain description, connecting test tasks and performances to the communication demands test-takers face in real world; (2) evaluation, connecting test performances to scoring procedures and raw or “observed” scores; (3) generalization, connecting the observed scores to true/universe scores; (4) explanation, connecting the universe scores to theoretical score interpretations; (5) extrapolation, connecting the theoretical score interpretations to domain score interpretations; (6) utilization, connecting the test score interpretations to score-based decisions (see Figure 1). We used this framework as a means of capturing and categorizing the nature of test-related claims (i.e., whether these related to domain relevance, to the quality of design and/or technical procedures, to theories of language learning, and/or social needs/benefits).

Figure 1.

Framework for exploring UKBI claims and legitimation strategies.

Supports for claims were further coded using Van Leeuwen’s (2007, 2008) language of legitimation, which includes four primary categories of legitimation: (1) authorization, which involves invoking personal or impersonal authority, whether that authority stems from an individual, tradition, custom, or law; (2) moral evaluation, which involves referencing value systems, often implicitly, to generate a moral foundation; (3) rationalization, which involves referring to goals, means, and effects of institutionalized social action, or to “the knowledges that society has constructed to endow them with cognitive validity’” (Van Leeuwen, 2008, p. 106); and (4) mythopoesis, in which legitimation is carried out through narratives, often in the form of small stories or narrative fragments regarding the past or future.

Given that legitimation strategies often draw from and perpetuate overarching discourses and ideologies (Oddo, 2011; van Dijk, 1998), we incorporated Reisigl and Wodak’s (2016) DHA as a complementary framework, allowing us to link the legitimation strategies engaged by Badan Bahasa to broader sociopolitical, historical, and institutional contexts in Indonesia (see our earlier discussion of the latter under the heading “the UKBI as a policy-driven testing regime”). To this end, we examined each coded legitimation strategy according to the following DHA categories: (1) Nomination—How are persons, groups, or entities relevant to UKBI legitimation named or referred to? (2) Predication—What attributes or qualities are assigned to them to reinforce legitimacy? (3) Argumentation—What arguments are employed by Badan Bahasa for legitimation? (4) Perspectivization—From what perspective are these strategies articulated? (5) Intensification/Mitigation—Are these legitimations expressed overtly, amplified, or downplayed? The iterative analysis, comprising empirical observations of legitimations across types of UKBI-related documents, relevant theoretical knowledge, and rich contextual information, allowed us to formulate a critique of the interpretive argument of the UKBI, encompassing its surrounding sociopolitical, historical, and institutional dimensions.

Results

Table 1 sets out the claims made about UKBI by Badan Bahasa, derived from an examination of the 50 documents in response to RQ1. In the table, due to space constraints, only English translations are provided. Numbers in brackets refer to the document numbers in which inferences and claims were identified. As shown in Table 1, key claims related to UKBI score interpretations and uses, including intended consequences (ramifications), covered all seven of the relevant inferences of an argument-based validation framework, with more identified claim statements related to the domain description, utilization and ramification inferences, taken together, than statements concerning the other four inferences. Statements related to test use (utilization) occurred most frequently across the documents.

Table 1.

Claims about UKBI by Badan Bahasa.

Inferences	Example claims	Example support
Domain definition (Docs 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11)	UKBI is well-suited for use across various professional sectors and educational levels. Its test tasks are designed to reflect the authentic use of Bahasa Indonesia across diverse language domains, encompassing survival, social, vocational, and academic discourse contexts.	UKBI went through a standardized test construction process, involving test material inventory, item consignment, standardization, empirical trials, validation, and item banking.
Evaluation (Docs 8, 11, 13)	UKBI is a reliable test, which can capture the performance of Indonesian speakers across proficiency levels quickly, accurately, and efficiently.	UKBI utilizes an MSAT system, appropriately selecting and delivering items, and scoring responses based on the test-takers’ proficiency levels.
Generalization (Docs 3, 11)	UKBI provides accurate and reliable scores, employing systematic procedures in comparing test tasks.	The validity and reliability tests had been conducted during the development phase of the UKBI test items
Explanation (Docs 1, 4, 9, 10)	UKBI measures Indonesian language proficiency for personal, social, professional, and academic purposes	The construct underlying UKBI was developed through theoretical research on linguistic competence, pragmatic competence (communicative competence), and cognitive abilities
Extrapolation (Docs 1, 4, 9)	Score: 725–800. This level signifies exceptional proficiency in Indonesian, with mastery in spoken and written communication across personal, social, professional, and academic contexts with no significant barriers.	High school students’ participation in the UKBI has been linked to improved scores on their college entrance exams (UTBK), with some schools reporting significant gains.
Utilization (Docs 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18)	UKBI is a multi-purpose test. Its scores can be used to map language proficiency, screen candidates, and enhance human resource competencies across diverse professional sectors and educational levels	UKBI certificate has become a requirement for scholarship applications and a criterion in employee selection, demonstrating the growing recognition of the importance of proficiency in the Indonesian language.
Ramification (Docs 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12)	UKBI Adaptif Merdeka has a positive impact on language development and advancement in Indonesia. The positive impact extends to speakers of Bahasa Indonesia, institutions, and the nation as a whole.	UKBI has a positive impact on language development and cultivation in Indonesia, ensures professional quality, strengthens national ideological values, and advances science and technology.

RQ2 involved examining legitimation and other discursive strategies implicit in assertions in support of test design and uses. We identified two prominent legitimation strategies: authorization and rationalization. As shown in Table 2, the first of these two broad strategies was further divided into “impersonal authority” and “personal authority.” The second, rationalization, primarily involved alignment with international standard practices in language testing (best-practice appeals) and with national policy agendas in areas of education, employment, and immigration (impact-oriented appeals). As outlined further below, these two rationalization strategies tapped into broader-level discourses/ideologies, including crisis discourses of a literacy deficit among Indonesians and a lack of proficiency on the part of foreign workers, as well as value-based, ideological discourses, including a need to bolster the status of Bahasa Indonesia in the face of perceived threats to Indonesian national identity. It is important to note that these legitimation strategies could appear individually or in combination and were often scattered across various sections of text and across texts.

Table 2.

An overview of legitimation strategies for UKBI and their central characteristic.

Legitimation strategies	Central characteristics
Authorization	Appealing to recognized sources of authority to construct UKBI’s existence, design, use, and impact as legitimate (i.e., proper, appropriate, desirable, and necessary).
Impersonal authorization
a. Law or regulation	Referencing legal frameworks (e.g., Ministerial Regulation No. 70/2016) to demonstrate formal approval and binding norms for the test.
b. Government agencies	Highlighting approval from authoritative government bodies and alignment with their goals to frame the test as an institutionally backed and mission-driven initiative.
c. Public approval	Highlighting public acceptance, satisfaction, or endorsement of the UKBI as validation for the test’s significance.
Personal authorization
a. Official figures	Highlighting commendations from government officials (e.g., Minister of Education and Culture) to reinforce legitimacy.
b. Expert voices	Leveraging expert opinions (e.g., psychometricians) to substantiate the test’s credibility and present it as informed by professional knowledge and expertise.
Rationalization	Appealing to technical, instrumental, and consequential aspects of testing practice to construct the legitimacy of UKBI.
a. Best-practice appeals	Presenting the test as aligned with international standard practices in test development, administration, and validation to establish trust in the test.
b. Impact-oriented appeals	Legitimation by highlighting the test’s utility in addressing national interests and effecting positive outcomes at individual, institutional, and systemic levels.
Employment of broader-level discourses/ideologies	Embedding UKBI in wider societal, cultural, and institutional narratives, values, or ideologies to gain legitimacy.
a. Crisis discourse	Highlighting crises (e.g., literacy issues) to underscore the test’s urgency and significance.
b. Nationalism	Tying the test to nationalist discourses (e.g., identity-building, civic responsibility, cultural preservation) to reinforce its legitimacy.

Legitimation through authorization

Considering that the test is a product of a government agency, it is not surprising that authorization was invoked across a range of texts for legitimation purposes. Legitimation based on authority attributed to an entity (impersonal) and an individual (personal) are discussed in turn below.

Impersonal authority

As shown in Table 2, we identified three main types of impersonal authority, involving the authority of law or regulation, the authority of government agencies, and the authority of public approval. Legitimation through appeals to the authority of law or regulation invoked the role of UKBI as part of an official governance mandate, often with official endorsement of its quality and status (Excerpt 1).

Excerpt 1

UKBI Adaptif, as a creative work, has been formally recognized through a Creation Registration Letter No. 000397427 issued by the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, which affirms its legality and standardization as a valid and officially acknowledged tool for measuring Indonesian language proficiency. (Doc. 3)

In Excerpt 1, legitimacy of the test is promoted through predication, with attributes “valid,” “formally recognized,” and “creative work.” The Creation Registration Letter provides legal and bureaucratic validation of the test as an intellectual product at the national level, while the ministerial regulation situates UKBI as compliant with national policies on language, education, employment, immigration, and citizenship, lending credibility to its implementation and use across various domains.

Reference to law was a prominent feature in legitimation strategies we identified. For instance, the Indonesian Proficiency Test Guideline (Doc. 4) lists eight legal bases for UKBI (e.g., Law No. 24/2009 on the Flag, Language, Symbol of the State, and the National Anthem). These references not only highlight the comprehensive regulatory framework supporting UKBI but also demonstrate how appeals to impersonal authority of law or regulation are strategically leveraged to position the test as both credible and indispensable, reinforcing its role in advancing national language policies and standards. This is further evident in Excerpt 2 below, as UKBI is associated with key governmental bodies that are directly responsible for language policy and development.

Excerpt 2

To position Indonesian on par with the world’s major languages, the Language Development and Cultivation Agency under the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology developed the Indonesian Language Proficiency Test (UKBI) [. . .] as a standardized assessment to measure the language proficiency levels of Indonesian speakers. (Doc. 9)

In Excerpt 2, a strategy of perspectivization is evident, in the foregrounding of Badan Bahasa and its affiliation with the Ministry as the authoritative institution behind the creation of UKBI, situating it as an instrument of national significance. The institutional authority of Badan Bahasa works as a legitimation strategy, as it is also “the sole governmental authority entrusted with the responsibility of managing linguistic and literature matters within Indonesia. Its primary mission is to safeguard and enhance the quality of Bahasa Indonesia across diverse domains” (Doc. 45). By associating UKBI with a trusted and specialized government agency, the test’s legitimacy is bolstered, and its implementation is positioned as part of a larger, systematic effort to promote and sustain the Indonesian language. Note also the explicit reference to efforts to internationalize Bahasa Indonesia (“to position Indonesian on par with the world’s major languages”). This strategic alignment underscores the role of government agencies as central actors in the legitimation process, leveraging their institutional authority to establish the credibility and necessity of UKBI.

Public approval also represented a source of impersonal authority, exemplified in Excerpt 3, below.

Excerpt 3

In 2023, there were 342 videos made by the public and uploaded to YouTube. [. . .] This reflects public pride in UKBI. [. . .] News coverage about UKBI is also increasingly [. . .] reaching 272 news pieces published within a year. This widespread media attention on UKBI demonstrates that the test is increasingly recognized and deemed necessary by the public. (Doc. 3)

This legitimation strategy is characterized by quantification, which in this case is of public engagement (e.g., 342 videos and 272 news pieces) to underscore the test’s broad acceptance and perceived relevance. These numbers also serve to underline UKBI’s symbolic status as a matter of national pride. The phrase “public pride in UKBI” is a deliberate predication, attributing positive evaluations to the public’s engagement with the test. The discursive construction of legitimation here relies on the narrative that UKBI transcends institutional mandates and garners spontaneous support from the general public. This positioning is reinforced through perspectivization, where the public is presented as an independent, active stakeholder in promoting UKBI. Social media activity, in particular, is depicted as a grassroots phenomenon, demonstrating alignment between institutional goals and societal endorsement.

Personal authority

Personal authority was also invoked as a legitimation strategy, involving reference to high-ranking officials and subject-matter experts and citations of their endorsements of UKBI (Excerpts 4 and 5).

Excerpt 4

Minister of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology, Nadiem Anwar Makarim, stated [. . .] “UKBI Adaptif Merdeka is one of our breakthroughs [as] a professional service for assessing Indonesian language proficiency.” [. . .] Nadiem Makarim encourages more massive use of UKBI in society. According to him, UKBI can be equated with other globally recognized language proficiency tests. (Doc. 33)

Excerpt 5

According to psychometric expert Bahrul Hayat, . . . Four key attributes distinguish UKBI Adaptif Merdeka as a high-quality and modern assessment. First, it is firmly grounded in both language and test theory, utilizing the MSAT (Multistage Adaptive Testing) system. Second, the selection and construction of the question bank for UKBI incorporate psychometric analysis. Third, UKBI employs a standardized assessment scale . . . Fourth, UKBI places significant emphasis on the administration of the test, employing a sophisticated system . . . These four defining attributes can be aptly encapsulated using several descriptive terms: adaptive, dynamic, reliable, and sophisticated. (Doc. 12)

In Excerpt 5, legitimacy is drawn from the endorsement of Bahrul Hayat as a “psychometric expert” in a citation emphasizing four attributes: theoretical grounding, psychometric rigor, standardization, and advanced administration systems. The detailed description of these attributes draws on technical vocabulary of testing (“MSAT,” “psychometric analysis,” “standardized assessment scale”), which implies empirical and theoretical robustness in the test’s development and administration. Hayat’s positive predication of UKBI culminates in the use of descriptors such as “adaptive,” “dynamic,” “reliable,” and “sophisticated.” These terms link UKBI to broader discourses of innovation in education and assessment, particularly in a digital age, while maintaining its alignment with traditional concerns of reliability and validity.

Legitimation through rationalization

Rationalization strategies were categorized as best-practice appeals and impact-oriented appeals, as presented below.

Best-practice appeals

This legitimation strategy involved assertions of rigorous, standardized procedures of test development and implementation (Excerpt 6).

Excerpt 6

UKBI went through a standardized test construction process, involving test material inventory, item consignment, standardization, empirical trials, validation, and item banking. (Doc. 10)

In Excerpt 6, explicit references to technical procedures—such as test material inventory, empirical trials, and item-banking—align UKBI development with international standards of test development and signify the technical proficiency of Badan Bahasa. Most of the discursive supports for inferences in the UKBI interpretive argument (Table 1) were categorized as best-practice appeals, as Badan Bahasa functioned to align their processes with international testing principles, albeit without any actual evidence. While these appeals to best practice were not associated with a source of authority, similar use of technical vocabulary as that cited from experts (as in Excerpt 5, for example) creates an implicit alignment with this expertise.

Impact-oriented appeals

This rationalization strategy involved an emphasis on the test’s utility in addressing national priorities and achieving positive outcomes across individual, institutional, and systemic levels, as exemplified in Excerpt 7:

Excerpt 7

In education, UKBI fosters critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication among students [. . .] In professional contexts, UKBI serves as an objective, standardized tool for mapping and enhancing human resource competencies during recruitment processes across government and private institutions [. . .] Designed with equality and accessibility principles, UKBI promotes inclusivity in education and language assessment [. . .] Furthermore, it boosts interest in Indonesian among foreign speakers, advances Indonesian language diplomacy globally [. . .] It contributes to improving the quality of Indonesian usage, developing skilled human resources, and strengthening the language’s national and international standing. (Doc. 3)

Here, rationalization encompasses multiple domains and purported social benefits associated with test use. In the educational domain, UKBI is represented as a key instrument for developing 21st-century skills—critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication—aligning it with contemporary pedagogical imperatives, and connecting the test with the broader goals of the Merdeka Curriculum. In the professional domain, UKBI is framed as objective and standardized, implicitly invoking social values of fairness as a level playing field in employment selection. At a cultural and ideological level, the test is explicitly linked to the realization of national-level policy aspirations—promoting Indonesian language diplomacy globally and elevating the quality of Indonesian language use. Below, these strategies are linked to the discursive narratives that support their rationalization, particularly crisis discourse and nationalist ideologies.

Crisis discourse

The use of crisis discourse as a legitimation strategy involves framing UKBI as a necessary solution to pressing national problems, thereby reinforcing a problem-solution nexus in support of the test and policy mandate, as exemplified in Excerpt 8, below, which cites the voice of the Minister of Education and Culture.

Excerpt 8

I encourage all Indonesians to maximize the advantages offered by UKBI Adaptif Merdeka. We all need to measure the extent of our proficiency in using Indonesia, the results of which can then serve as our basis for mapping and improving the literacy skills of Indonesian society as a whole (Doc. 14)

Across numerous documents, a number of key themes, in addition to literacy issues, were framed as crises that UKBI will address, including low literacy levels of teachers and academics in Bahasa Indonesia (Doc. 16, 18, 19, 22), a lack of language competence by professionals (Doc. 36, 46), the relaxed language proficiency requirements for foreign workers (Doc. 48), the preservation of national identity (Doc. 30, 44, 48), and the national and international standing of Bahasa Indonesia (Doc. 3, 12).

Nationalism

The legitimation strategies employed by Badan Bahasa also drew on and reproduced broader-level ideological discourses of an Indonesian language—national identity nexus, as the following Excerpt 9, with two examples from media releases, shows:

Excerpt 9

UKBI has a very strategic function, not only to improve the quality of the Indonesian language, its use and teaching nationally and internationally, but also to foster a positive attitude and a sense of pride among the Indonesian people towards their language. (Doc. 9)

Ideological benefits, in the context of UKBI, refer to the advantages acquired by the nation and state in bolstering the national ideology among Indonesian speakers. (Doc. 12)

From these examples, it is evident that the UKBI is not only a measure of Indonesian language proficiency but also functions as an instrument to “foster positive attitude” and “a sense of pride” toward the Indonesian language, which in turn benefits the nation and state by “bolstering the national ideology.” Another example of UKBI legitimation tapping into Indonesian nationalism is illustrated in the following extract, underscoring the struggle of Indonesian against the dominance of English through the TOEFL:

Excerpt 10

Notably, we have a tool equivalent to TOEFL, namely, Indonesian Language Proficiency Test (UKBI). Regrettably, UKBI still lacks the recognition it merits [. . .] UKBI test plays a crucial role in establishing the dignity of Indonesian as the official language [. . .] It seems illogical that while TOEFL is mandatory in our country, UKBI remains overlooked. [. . .] UKBI . . . must be an obligation, especially for the vocational, academic, and professional contexts in our country. (Doc. 50)

In Excerpt 10, the suitability of the UKBI over the TOEFL Institutional Testing Program (ITP) for “vocational, academic, and professional contexts” purposes was not legitimized by referencing an evidential basis (i.e., validity studies). Instead, it was established by framing the struggle of the Indonesian language and the UKBI test against the dominance of English, embodied by the TOEFL in this instance.

Discussion and conclusion

The current study aimed to identify claims made by Badan Bahasa, the test developer and policy agent, about the UKBI in Indonesia and to critically interrogate the strategies used by Badan Bahasa to legitimize the test and its intended uses, including the discursive and ideological underpinnings of legitimation. As shown in the Results section, we identified numerous instances of claims relevant to each of the seven inferences of an argument-based validation framework, including various assertions of robust procedures and test quality, but no empirical evidence of these, to date, signaling an urgent need for validation research in this context.

We found that claim statements related to UKBI design and quality of measurement were largely characterized by technical vocabulary (e.g. standardization, item-banking, validation, reliability, validity), and passing references to aspects of test development, including “empirical trials,” “language and test theory,” and “psychometric analysis.” The employment of technical terminology functions to foreground the formal and scientific character of the UKBI, consistent with Shohamy’s (2001) assertion that the utilization of the “language of science” serves to reinforce the power of tests, in no small part by creating an obstacle to public scrutiny. This also reflects what McNamara and Roever’s (2006) call “psychometric sophistication” in which “the authority of psychometrics acts as a kind of legitimation for the practice and makes its political character so much harder to identify and to challenge” (p. 161).

In addition, there is thus far little scope for expert scrutiny of test design and implementation processes, with no published research to date on the test and no detailed information about test specifications or test development publicly available. Scrutiny was further hindered by the absence of a single and encompassing statement of test purpose, and a lack of explicit logic linking the various uses to characteristics of the domain and test-takers. Rather, test purposes became manifest through various assertions and implicatures, across numerous documents; various UKBI design-related claims, taken together, encompassed an intention to measure language ability for education and employment, and to target test-takers, including “all Indonesians” as well as foreign students and workers. Such discursive assertions can be regarded in terms of what Knoch and Macqueen (2020) refer to as the “stated” construct, which represents “the public face” of “what the assessment designer or provider claims the assessment elicits and measures” (p. 41). While it is reasonable for these aspects to be expressed in lay terms, it is expected that test developers provide supplementary information for expert scrutiny, accessible at various levels assessment literacy (e.g., for teachers and for test score users). This aligns with recent calls for Open Science to be adopted in language testing (e.g., Winke, 2024), whereby transparency and open access to research are viewed as enabling better-quality tests and promoting appropriate test score uses and robust evidence-based public trust in testing practices.

It should be noted though that even in the cases of large, well-resourced English testing organizations, there can be a lack of availability and/or transparency of the empirical basis for test-related claims, even for key stakeholders (Knoch & Macqueen, 2024). Especially regarding more distal test uses, such as language testing for immigration and citizenship purposes, there has also been a lack of interest to date on the part of testing organizations in funding critical research agendas, which may expose problematic practices (O’Sullivan & Chalhoub-Deville, 2021). Given a clear intention on the part of Badan Bahasa to align the quality of UKBI with that of established international English tests evident in the documents we examined (albeit for ambivalent reasons), our study highlights the need for greater responsibility on the part of large, well-resourced international test developers. They not only play a key role in shaping how language test constructs and purposes are understood by test users across different domains (Macqueen et al., 2021), they are also providing exemplars of “all-purpose” testing that are being drawn on in Indonesia and other countries in Asia, where local large-scale language assessments, such as UKBI, are rapidly emerging.

As reported in the Results section, in the absence of empirical evidence, we found that support for UKBI-related claims consisted of various legitimation strategies, including endorsements from different voices of authority (authorization). This discursive practice further highlights that legitimation processes involve the creation of the perceived need, acceptance, and trust in a test through “its presence and use in powerful places, rather than from a more detailed knowledge of the instrument or what it measures” (Macqueen et al., 2021, p. 62).

Our results demonstrated that rationalization, the other key legitimation strategy we identified, was intrinsically linked to wider discourses circulating in Indonesia around a widespread literacy crisis and around a need to strengthen the status and relevance of Bahasa Indonesia as the national language in the face of a range of pressures. These pressures included the rise in importance and prevalence of English proficiency testing in Indonesia, now widely used and often required for university admissions, job applications, and vocational programs. This trend is perceived by some as an affront, potentially undermining Bahasa Indonesia’s status in its own country (Lamb et al., 2021; Zein, 2019), while others perceive both English and Bahasa Indonesia as potential threats to Indonesia’s linguistic diversity (see Zein, 2020). Badan Bahasa’s efforts to redevelop and promote the UKBI can be thus viewed as aligning with, if not driven by, particular social values and an associated objective to increase national and global recognition of Bahasa Indonesia, with the potential impact on other languages in Indonesia rendered invisible through discursive legitimation, not to mention the impacts of large-scale testing on social equity and access to opportunities across this diverse linguistic and social ecology.

In conclusion, by examining claims about the UKBI together with a critical examination of the discursive legitimation and other discursive practices engaged to garner public acceptance and trust of the newly emerging testing regime, we have sought to highlight complex ways in which technical expertise, policy agendas, and wider discourses and ideologies are entangled within testing practices. Our study thus situates language testing as a critical discursive practice (Shin, 2024). This serves, we hope, to enhance what has been referred to as “policy literacy” on the part of language testers, to encompass not only the needs and interests of policy makers (Deygers et al., 2021), but also an understanding of the workings of policy-embedded language testing as a discursively produced social practice. This, we suggest, entails methods that render visible our own inferences and the evidence upon which these are based, concerning social values, dominant ideologies, and the appropriateness or otherwise of the social and political roles of language tests. Specifically in the case of the UKBI in Indonesia, by shedding light on value-based assumptions and ideologies underlying intended test uses, we hope to support the development of a research agenda to enhance and strengthen the quality of the test for promoting meaningful language teaching and learning in Indonesia, while also enhancing visibility and space for critical engagement with the ways in which tests come to be represented as legitimate, multi-purpose solutions to a range of policy concerns around language.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-ltj-10.1177_02655322251351710 – Supplemental material for Evaluating the logic of a policy-driven national language test in Indonesia: A critical discursive investigation of the Test of Indonesian Proficiency (UKBI)

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ltj-10.1177_02655322251351710 for Evaluating the logic of a policy-driven national language test in Indonesia: A critical discursive investigation of the Test of Indonesian Proficiency (UKBI) by Rahmad Adi Wijaya and Kellie Frost in Language Testing

Footnotes

Author contributions

Rahmad Adi Wijaya: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Writing—original draft; Writing—review & editing.

Kellie Frost: Conceptualization; Methodology; Supervision; Writing—original draft; Writing—review & editing.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research study reported in the manuscript was conducted by the first author as part of the Master of Applied Linguistics (coursework) at the University of Melbourne, supported by a scholarship from the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education Agency (LPDP).

Ethical approval

The study is covered by program ethics approval from the Human Ethics Team, Office of Research Ethics and Integrity, University of Melbourne.

ORCID iDs

Rahmad Adi Wijaya

Kellie Frost

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online at the following link: .

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