In Chapter 3, the author introduces the concepts of context, purpose, and impact. The chapter begins with a discussion of sociopolitical, cultural, and educational contextual influences on language assessments. The author uses well-known language assessment examples of these effects, including Norton and Stein’s Monkey Passage and how sociopolitical factors affected a group of Black African high school students when they took a reading assessment. The author uses Hall’s framework that considers people’s tendencies to act in certain ways depending on their cultural backgrounds and considers how these tendencies are important when designing and using an assessment for a particular purpose. The author also discusses levels of impact that an assessment can have on individuals, including its effect on test takers and their families, people who have a close relationship with test takers, and even people who do not have a close relationship with test takers.

A number of chapters in this volume have highlighted the role of testing and assessment in contributing to maintaining monolith conceptualisations of English, and conversely the hybrid nature of the language and lack of clear boundaries, especially in L2 versions. Accordingly, this chapter discusses the role of the L1 in assessing L2 English proficiency, focusing particularly on tests of L2 English speaking ability. It first considers Weir’s (2005) socio-cognitive framework for developing and validating speaking tests (further elaborated in Taylor, 2011), in order to locate the issue of L1 influence comprehensively within an overall test validation framework. It then describes how the different test purposes for which tests are designed can determine the role of the L1, according to the specific construct of the test. To exemplify differing roles that can be played by the L1 in speaking tests, this chapter then presents two studies on L2 spoken English tests that sought to address the issue of test-takers’ L1 in contrastive ways.