Introduction: the limits of ethics in language testing

Abstract

The articles in this special issue were written for a symposium on the ethics of language testing held at the triennial congress of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée in August 1996 in Finland. This special issue addresses the role of ethics (and the limits of that role) in professional activities such as language testing. The nine articles that follow can be divided into four sections. The two articles in the first section (Spolsky and Hawthorne) consider language testing as a means of political control. The two in the second section (Elder, and Norton and Starfield) are concerned essentially with the definition of the test con struct — Elder considering whether the construct has the same meaning for differ ent groups and Norton and Starfield questioning whether it is form or content that is being assessed. The two articles in the third section (Hamp-Lyons and Rea- Dickins) consider the effects of language tests on the various stakeholders who are involved. In the fourth section, the three articles (Shohamy, Lynch and Davies) offer criteria for promoting ethicality in language testing, Lynch by an approach from principle (deontological), Davies through the professionalizing of the activity (teleological), and Shohamy through attention both to method and to consequence.