Language, and What You Are Actually Testing

Every written assessment is partly a language test. The question is whether language proficiency is a genuine requirement at the level your materials demand.

Once the criteria described in “Language, and What You Are Actually Testing” are fixed, the practical challenge is running them consistently across assessors. A coordinator can use the official page to plan review time, compare the effort spent at each stage and spot avoidable delays, without confusing administrative efficiency with the quality of the evidence collected from candidates.

For an independent benchmark, compare the process with CIPD inclusive recruitment guidance; the useful test is whether the local method remains job-related, proportionate and explainable.

Where it matters

Roles where written communication is the work: drafting, correspondence, documentation.

Roles with safety-critical verbal instruction.

Client-facing roles where a specific standard is genuinely needed.

In those, assess it directly and openly rather than as a by-product.

Where it silently excludes

Technical roles where the work is code, numbers or physical skill, assessed through dense written scenarios.

Any role where the assessment language is more complex than the job requires.

And situational judgement tests, which depend on nuance and idiom more than almost any other format.

Checking your own materials

Read your assessment and ask what reading level it requires.

Compare against the documents the role actually handles.

If the assessment is harder than the job, it is testing something the job does not need, and that difference falls on second-language candidates and on candidates with certain conditions.

Simplifying without dumbing down

Short sentences. One idea each.

Common words where they exist.

Idiom removed, because it is the part second-language speakers lose most.

Technical vocabulary kept where the role uses it — that is legitimate and is not the same as complex prose.

Interviews

Verbal fluency is what unstructured interviews largely measure, and it is not the same as capability.

Structured questions with written prompts help, because the candidate can read as well as hear.

Allow thinking time. Somebody composing in a second language needs a moment, and the pause is not hesitation about the content.

And score the substance of the answer rather than its delivery, which needs stating explicitly in the rubric because assessors drift toward fluency without noticing.

Accents and comprehension

Assessors sometimes mark down candidates they find harder to understand.

This is documented and it is discrimination.

Naming it in assessor training reduces it, and having two assessors reduces it further.

Translation and support

Where the role does not require the assessment language at the level tested, consider allowing dictionaries, extra time, or assessment in another language.

Each is straightforward and each widens the pool substantially in multilingual labour markets.

What to check

What reading level does your assessment require, against the job?

Does your rubric say to score substance rather than fluency?

Are written prompts provided alongside verbal questions?

And has anybody read your materials for idiom?

The point

Compare the reading level of your assessment against the documents the role handles.

If the assessment is harder, it is testing something the job does not need.

Underlying all of this

Almost everything in this collection reduces to one discipline: write down what the job requires, assess that thing directly, record the evidence, and look at your own outcomes afterwards. None of it requires buying anything, and organisations that do those four things consistently outperform ones running longer processes built from instruments chosen before the requirements were known.

The recurring pattern

The recurring failure across every section here is the same: measuring what is convenient rather than what matters, then never checking whether it predicted anything. The check is an afternoon of work once a year, and it is the step that separates a process that improves from one that merely persists.