There is no point adopting the principles outlined above
and then assessing the students against native speaker norms and
cultures. Assessment must be closely aligned with what is being
taught. This means that students need to be assessed on how
successfully they can use English in ASEAN settings. This, in turn,
means developing measures of functional proficiency – whether
students are able to perform certain tasks in the language - as
opposed to measuring how closely the students’ English
conforms to native speaker norms. For example, a pronunciation
benchmark that only awards the top level to speakers whose
accent betrays no first language influence is precisely the type of
benchmark that needs to be discarded. Such benchmarks need
to be replaced with criteria that measure how successfully
students can get their messages across and perform certain
linguistic tasks. While by no means a perfect set of measures, the
European Common Framework of Reference offers a potential
example of the type of functional assessment that could be
adapted for the ASEAN context. It must be underlined, however, that it is important that ASEAN develop its own measures of
assessment rather than rely on those developed elsewhere. Only
then can the assessment be properly linked to the aims of the
English language teaching programmes.