FUJIWARA, Yasuhiro (Meijo University)

The main purposes of this talk are twofold. One is to introduce recent developments in language testing from the perspectives of World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF). In short, WE respects the diversity of Englishes and evaluators while ELF assesses how learners achieve an assigned task while accommodating to and communicating with others using various strategies. The other is to open a critical discussion on these WE- and ELF-informed testing practices as well as traditional native-oriented testing practices, considering what is really desirable for ELT here in Japan. Apparently, there is no single answer on this issue, but it is really clear that we need to face it as teaching practitioners because the use of English around the world has surely been changing.