Mapping the applicants’ learnability: a discourse analysis of assessors’ talk of admission tests for Swedish specialist music teacher education

ABSTRACT This article concerns assessors’ use of predictions of applicants’ ability to learn when assessing admission tests for specialist music teacher education in Sweden. The data consist of stimulated-recall interviews with video-recorded admission tests as stimuli, and the analyses are based on discourse psychology with a focus on the variations, functions, and effects of the assessors’ statements about learning opportunities. The results highlight several ways of talking about applicants’ learnability, based on the view that learnability is a matter of teacher help, learning time, applicant age, and talent. Based on these results, learnability can be considered a selection tool, legitimised with reference to the assessors as experts able to foresee and make decisions about applicants’ future development opportunities. In this sense, the test contexts can be seen as permeated by educational traditions in which discourses about learnability govern the assessors’/masters’ decisions.