Oral English Proficiency Tests, Interpretive Labor, and the Neoliberal University

Abstract

Tests of English proficiency for international graduate students at US universities are neoliberal institutions which make (mis)communication the responsibility of individual workers. While cloaking themselves in a discourse of linguistic expertise, they require test-takers to assimilate to white, upper class, American mannerisms. In this ethnographic study of two testing centers, we address their material and ideological consequences: increases in precarity and xenophobia, losses in pay and students' communicative competence. We trace tests' distribution of interpretive labor (Graeber 2015) and propose a new interactionally informed approach to intelligibility which accounts for the co-operation (Goodwin 2018) of multiple subjects.