The National English ability test in Korea and its legitimising discourses

Abstract

This study uses Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA) paradigm to analyse Korean Ministry of Education (MOE) policy documents legitimising the National English Ability Test (NEAT) and consolidating a testing regime wherein educational testing is strongly positioned as a social technology facilitating practical English use. Focusing on discourse, style, and genre, this study illustrates how representational, identificational, and actional meanings of policy texts are socially constituted but also shape/reinforce the test's surrounding structure, which it describes with reference to the concept of technopoly. To begin with discourse, one's English competence is represented as an entity, where practical English use is specified as test construct; and NEAT development is represented as a technology aimed at facilitating practical use of English. As for style, the analysed documents show frequent use of transitivity and measurement registers, along with authorial self-assertions as experts and authorities. Last, the policy documents share a positivistic genre structure within which the mandate for test development is intertextually interwound to reinforce the underlying belief in efficiency, standardisation, and progress. The documents, in which test-driven policies are articulated, serve as an arena for agenda-setting in terms of sociopolitical discourses, but there remains little critical analysis of materials for language testing. Future research works should consider how agents of social change can legitimize or challenge testing-related policy discourses.