Prof. HU Guangwei, Department of English and Communication

A testing time for testing global Englishes. Global English Education China Assembly. China Daily, Beijing Normal University, and Shanghai International Studies University, Zhuhai, China, 25-28 July 2024.

Abstract
The ever-deepening globalization in the last few decades has seen the emergence and growth of new communities of English learners and users, a growing diversity of cultural and educational contexts of English learning, and the accelerating spread of English into more and more domains of use. These fundamental changes in the uses and users of English have posed great challenges for language assessment in Global Englishes. In this presentation, I will review and critique extant responses to these challenges by identifying and discussing the thorny issues that they have tried to tackle without success. In view of these unsuccessful responses and the resultant conundrum, I will propose a way forward by reconceptualizing the construct of English proficiency in terms of communicative effectiveness rather than form-centered considerations. I will then present several principles that can guide the operationalization of this reconceptualized construct in actual assessments of proficiency in Global Englishes. Finally, I will conclude this presentation with a discussion on the implications that the proposed reconceptualization of English proficiency has for English language teacher education.