Record Detail

In 2008, the Ministry of Education of South Korea planned to develop a domestic, standardized lan-guage test called the National English Ability Test (NEAT)as part of sweeping reforms designed to democratize andimprove the Korean education system. On many levels,NEAT was an innovative initiative. From a financial per-spective, NEAT was designed to curb private spending onEnglish education and to divert money from internationalstandardized English tests. Educationally, NEAT wasgroundbreaking in that it introduced speaking and writinginto English assessment and was meant to replace theEnglish section on the College Scholastic Ability Test ofKorea. In addition, NEAT was a two-track English test forhigh school students intended to meet the differing needs ofstudents and colleges. After about five years, including atrialing period and a new presidential administration, plansfor implementing NEAT were abandoned officially in2013. The present paper examines the educational,sociopolitical, and economic factors that led to the rise anddemise of NEAT from a critical language testing per-spective. Following the tenets of critical language testing,this paper addresses the responsibility of the languagetesters to create an assessment that fairly measures test-takers’ language proficiency. A review and an inductiveinterpretation of policy documents and recent NEATresearch demonstrate the discrepancies among the originalintentions of NEAT, the unintended outcomes, and over-looked issues of practicality. Findings also reveal that thetwo tracks of NEAT negatively branded both students anduniversities, deepening instead of alleviating the English divide