The evolution and devolution of language tests in Vietnam-an ecological review

This article takes an ecological perspective to discuss language tests in Vietnam in the early twenty-first century. The major facts and figures are about VSTEP, but the discussion also includes a wide range of other important language tests that have been developed, evolved and devolved, during this period in the country. The article will first revisit the discussion on the plethora of implications of the terms such tests are often named after in the literature – as ‘locally-produced’, ‘localized’, or simply ‘local’ tests, which were first asserted by the author in 2019 (Nguyen, 2019 ). This article will then elevate these proposals by providing broader and deeper insights to exemplify these concepts. Specifically, the article will analyze the development and use of language tests in Vietnam, and their changes, either evolution or devolution or even both, in response to various and changing contextual challenges and demands to explicate the operationalizations of those terms. In addition, the article will discuss in great detail of how Vietnamese test developers deals with competition as well as cooperation in the testing ecosystem of their own tests with other locally-produced tests and many international and imported tests. Just like the analogy in nature, any ecosystem is a community of organisms in symbiosis. The article will discuss how these symbiotic relationships function in three levels of contexts via the statistics of the use of individual users of existing language tests for the micro level, how schools value these different tests for the meso level, and the related national policies on international language tests versus local tests for the macro level. Based on these multifaceted accounts in light of an ecological approach, the article will suggest some potential areas for further research on glocalized language tests, not only in Asia but also in other parts of the world.