Scholars have argued for the inclusion of different spoken varieties of English in high-stakes listening tests to better represent the global use of English. However, doing so may introduce additional construct-irrelevant variance due to accent familiarity and the shared first language (L1) advantage, which could threaten test fairness. However,…

Argues that tests have always been used as a means of political and social control. Maintains that test results are unreliable, especially at the extremes, that their predictive power is weak and that language testers need to be skeptical and need to insist on complete information on candidates' backgrounds for selection decision making. (10…