This chapter suggests that culture and evaluation are inextricably linked. Therefore, culture should not be regarded as a phenomenon that needs to be controlled for in assessments; rather, it should be regarded as a fundamental component of assessment, beginning with its conceptualization and continuing through its design, construction, and interpretation of student performance. This study aims to discuss the relationship of culture to language assessment, teachers' awareness of cultural and linguistic bias in testing, and the negative effect of test bias on learners' motivation and performance; the ways of minimizing linguistic and cultural bias in language tests and maximizing cultural validity in classroom-based language assessment; to find out how learners and teachers from different cultures view success from a language learning perspective; and to find out how learners and teachers from different cultures view success from a cultural perspective.
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Several factors affecting learners’ test performance are encountered in the related literature (Birjandi & Alemi, 2010; Giannakos, 2013; Janebi Enayat & Babaii, 2018). In the field of language assessment, a big number of studies on the impacts of test-taker background features on language competence are also encountered (Kunnan, 2017; Kendik-Gut, 2019; Nasrul, Alberth, & Ino, 2019). Bachman (1990), in his communicative language competence framework, put forward that test-taker background features involve one of three principal aspects that influence performance on language test content. Bachman’s suggested background features cover background knowledge, cultural background, learning styles (field dependence, cognitive ability, native language, age, and gender (Kunnan, 1998; Bachman & Palmer, 2010; Ariyanti, 2016, Kasap, 2021); some other aspects can be put forward as diversities in culture and background knowledge that influence how they interpret test questions (Suzuki & DeKeyser, 2017,); language register utilized in the test and lack of familiarity with the vocabulary (Volodina, Weinert, & Mursin, 2020); limited English language proficiency (Erdodi, et al., 2017); and issues of language dominance (Solano-Flores, 2006; Treffers-Daller & Silva-Corvalán, 2016). The content knowledge and familiarity with the culture may also be added here.
As Goodwin and Macdonald (1997) state, ‘knowledge is personal, contextual, and cultural’ and so is learning. Culture is ingrained not only in the context of assessment but also in every other dimension of assessment (Harrison, et al., 2017; Köksal & Ulum, 2018, Kasap, 2020). Our way of acquiring and sharing knowledge differs from culture to culture (Köksal & Ulum, 2016). Learners from Mexican American culture, for instance, are prone to be less competitive than their dominant culture peers and more likely towards cooperating with peers to learn (Raeff, Greenfield, & Quiroz, 2000).
Such collectivistic cultures as Alaska Native and American Indian, Polynesian and Micronesian, those of Central America and Mexico, African and Asian cultures, are more oriented towards team achievement (Torelli, et al., 2020). However, individualistic cultures, such as the cultures of Western Europe (Swader, 2019), the United States (Mennell, 2020), and Australia (Chambers, et al., 2019), give prominence to individual success. Though these orientations are mentioned here as dichotomous, no group or person is totally collectivistic or individualistic in reality (Heu, Van Zomeren, & Hansen, 2019). That the naturally competing orientation of assessment in American education already puts such students at a disadvantage could be also expressed (Egalite & Mills, 2019). Thus, our principle should be ‘not competition but cooperation’ in classrooms.