Language analysis and assessment as border régimes: the MIKA-D school-entry test and segregative German language support classes

Abstract

In this article, I present a conceptual basis for understanding and critiquing how practices of language analysis and assessment (LAA) from European asylum, migration and citizenship contexts are influencing the structures and logic of education systems. The diversity of areas of application of LAA comes along with a heterogeneity of methodologies, epistemologies and discursive justifications, while displaying a marked consistency and unity in outcome, namely the categorisation of people into groups with differential access to rights and services. This heterogeneity in form and homogeneity in function, I argue, indicates a strategic reconfiguration of expertise, technologies and institutional procedures. Using the Foucauldian notion of the dispositive (cf. Bussolini, 2010), I aim to show that this reconfiguration is an intentional expansion of the epistemic, institutional and discursive network constituting nation-state border régimes (cf. Lehner, 2022) onto previously unrelated domains of knowledge and practice. As a case study, I present the Austrian system of segregative German language support classes, based on a procedure called MIKA-D, which screens children for their notional German competence (cf. Gruber, 2022). While MIKA-D and segregative German language support classes draw on pedagogical justifications, neither the screening procedure nor the segregative teaching model operate from an actual pedagogical or linguistic basis (Blaschitz, 2023 a, b). Instead, this system transposes the logics and mechanisms of nation-state borders onto the school context, producing a social order of languaged subjects (Hassemer, 2022) in a hierarchy of differential inclusion. By pointing out how this underlying epistemic configuration is transposed onto an increasing number of societal and social contexts, I aim to emphasise the need for applied linguistics to engage with how linguistic expertise is being redefined, reshaped and co-opted in the service of unscientific, non-linguistic and exclusionary policies.