Exploring the limits of authenticity in LSP testing: The case of a specific-purpose language test for health professionals

Passing a test of English communication skills is mandatory for overseas-trained health professionals seeking entry to clinical practice in many countries: for example in Finland, in Germany, and in many English-speaking countries. An ongoing challenge facing those responsible for testing these skills has been the need to link the language performance standards required for entry into clinical settings with the actual communication demands of the clinical context. The term used to denote such linkage between a language test and the relevant nontest setting is authenticity, although the notion is somewhat contested in our field. Early contributors to this journal have claimed that the quest for authenticity in language testing is chimerical (Spolsky, 1985; Stevenson, 1985) since tests are a necessarily decontextualized and indirect means of predicting performance in the real world. Nevertheless, it is now generally agreed that for tests developed within the communicative paradigm some degree of authenticity is worth striving for, these constraints notwithstanding. Early discussions of authenticity were focused mainly on input materials and the question of whether these should, in the interests of naturalness, be used in undoctored form on a test. Widdowson (1979) was perhaps the first to point out that it was not the nature of the texts that was at issue but rather whether they were put to use in a manner consonant with the author’s intentions. This notion of authenticity as involving an interaction between the language users and the text or task was elaborated for testing purposes by Bachman (1990). Authenticity is, however, only one of several (potentially competing) components in Bachman’s framework of test usefulness and may not necessarily be the prime consideration in all testing situations. In LSP (language for specific purposes) testing, on the other hand, it is paramount. Representation of the target context in a way that will engage the specific abilities