Kim, Jeongyeon, & Choi, Jinsook. 2014. University Administrative Workers' Perceptions of the Workplace Context under English as an Official Language Policy. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(2), 1-22. This study aims to examine how university administrative workers perceive the workplace context under English as an official language policy, and further how their perceptions of the context would correlate with the roles of English uses for work. The data came from the questionnaire responses of 116 employees of a Korean university and qualitative interviews with 6 administrative workers. Descriptive and correlation analyses showed that the participants' evaluation of three contextual factors, i.e., English as an official language policy, online English learning, and coworkers' English competence, was only moderate. In the self-evaluation of their English proficiency, the majority of the participants indicated that they were only able to participate in a short English dialogs, but had difficulty with English discussions. A striking difference was found in the evaluation of significance of English skills between their current work performance and under full execution of the policy. Although most of the participants ranked reading skill the most significant in their current work performances, they selected speaking as the most crucial skill under the full execution of the policy. Implications of the findings are presented for more efficient practices of English as an official language policy at work. (195)

According to Shohamy (2007), the tests of certain languages deliver messages and ideologies about the prestige, priorities and hierarchies of the languages, leading to policies of suppression of diversity. The test-driven language policies also lead to a narrow view of language as standardized and homogenous. The purpose of this paper is to contextualize English language tests in relation to language policy tools in Korea. The discussion of inappropriately used test-driven policies was supported by several test development cases in Korea, which appeared in newspaper articles, testing companies’ newsletters, or government documents. Different English language tests intended as language policy tools were categorized into three major situations: government-led, school-contextualized, and industry-based. It was argued that the English test-driven policy movement must have influenced teaching, learning, and the curriculum, to the extent that policy-making and testing essentially became synonymous.

This paper aims to provide guidelines on developing English language proficiency (ELP) tests based on the experience from ELP assessments in the U.S. after the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). While there might be substantial differences between the content and purpose of ELP tests developed from country to country, there are, however, areas that experts in charge of ELP test development in other countries can benefit from. The NCLB legislation in the U.S. made the assessment of English language learners (ELL) students’ level of proficiency in English mandatory once a year and provided useful guidelines for developing ELP assessments. This mandate, along with its useful guidelines, helped improve the quality of ELP assessment significantly and led to the development of several batteries of ELP assessments either through consortia of states or by test publishers in the U.S. The newly developed assessments were based on states’ ELP standards. They incorporated the concept of academic language which is an essential requirement for ELL students’ performance in the academic content areas, and were tested in extensive pilot and field studies. Some implications were drawn from such improvements for ELL assessment and accountability not only in the U.S. but in other countries including Korea.