[Linganth] Determining language proficiency by national origin

[Edwin Everhart]

Dear colleagues,

I’m looking for perspectives on the use of national origin as a means of
evaluating language proficiency. Do you know of any good references?

I’ve been looking at university policies for evaluating the English ability
of international graduate student teaching assistants. In some
institutions, the requirement of an English proficiency test is waived on
the basis of students’ citizenship. The institution evidently believes that
national origin predicts proficiency. In other cases, a proficiency test is
waived for students with degrees from Anglophone institutions, *but only
Anglophone institutions in certain countries, *so the primacy of national
origin remains. Note the glaring absence of India, for example, from this
UBC webpage:
https://you.ubc.ca/applying-ubc/requirements/english-language-competency/elas-countries/

There is plenty of good work on language competence being used to evaluate
national origin (three arguably representative examples below), but do you
know of any work dealing with the reverse?


   - Blommaert, Jan. 2009. Language, asylum, and the national order.
   Current Anthropology 50(4):415-441.
   - McNamara, Tim. 2012. Language assessments as shibboleths: A
   poststructuralist perspective. Applied linguistics 33(5):564-581.
   - Spotti, Massimiliano. 2015. Sociolinguistic Shibboleths at the
   Institutional Gate: Language, Origin, and the Construction of Asylum
   Seekers’ Identities. In Language and Superdiversity, Karel Arnaut, Jan
   Blommaert, Ben Rampton, & Massimiliano Spotti, eds. Routledge.


Meanwhile if you have thoughts about why international graduate students'
language proficiency is tested in the first place, and/or how these testing
regimes came about, I would be glad to learn about your favorite
references. The best two that I have are:

   - Lantolf, James P. & William Frawley. 1985. Oral-proficiency testing: A
   critical analysis. The Modern Language Journal 69(4):337-345.
   - Shohamy, Elana & Kate Menken. 2015. Language Assessment: Past to
   Present Misuses and Future Possibilities. In The Handbook of Bilingual and
   Multilingual Education, Wayne E. Wright, Sovicheth Boun, & Ofelia García,
   eds. John Wiley & Sons.

Thank you for considering this.

Edwin K. Everhart, PhD
Lecturer, UCLA Department of Anthropology
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