Agustinus Hardi Prasetyo

Rethinking English Assessment in Indonesia: From “Good English” to Meaningful English Use

The story of English in Indonesia is not simply a story of learning a foreign language. English has become part of education, professional life, popular culture, digital communication, and aspirations for social and economic mobility. Yet, in our classrooms and assessment practices, we continue to face an important question: What kind of English are we actually preparing learners to use?

From my perspective as a language assessment researcher, this question matters because assessment does more than measure learning. It also communicates what we value as English educators. When assessments continue to privilege decontextualized knowledge, grammatical accuracy, or narrowly defined models of proficiency, they may unintentionally reinforce the idea that successful English means approximating an external or “native” norm. This is particularly problematic in a context such as Indonesia, where English is used by multilingual speakers who bring diverse linguistic, cultural, and communicative resources to their English use.

My earlier work on language assessment literacy among Indonesian student-teachers highlighted how assessment practices are shaped not only by teachers’ knowledge but also by institutional expectations and the realities of school contexts. Building on this perspective, I explore the potential of scenario-based language assessment as one way of rethinking what we assess and how we assess it.

I argue that assessment in Indonesia should move beyond asking whether learners can produce “good English” and ask instead whether they can use English meaningfully, appropriately, and effectively in situations that matter to them. Such a shift may offer a more equitable and locally responsive way of imagining the next chapter of English in Indonesia—and, perhaps, in Southeast Asia.