Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational linguists, there remains no detailed and critical investigation into the nature of the tests, their effects on test takers, and the policy initiatives which led up to their implementation. This article contributes to this gap in knowledge, using critical language testing as a methodological framework, and drawing on a bricolage of data sources such as political speeches, policy documents, test questions and interviews with teachers. I discuss how the tests work as de facto language policy, implemented as one arm of the government’s ‘core-knowledge’ educational agenda, underpinned by a reductive conceptualisation of language and a problematic discourse of ‘right/wrong’ ways of speaking. I reveal how teachers talk about the ‘power’ of the tests, intimidating and coercing them into pedagogies they do not necessarily believe in or value, which ultimately position them as vehicles for the government’s conservative and prescriptive language ideologies.

中文翻译：

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英格兰小学的语法测试、事实上的政策和教学强制

自 2013 年保守党政府推出以来，英格兰的小学生已经接受了强制性的语法、标点和拼写评估，重点是去语境化、标准化的英语和传统语法术语的识别。尽管教育语言学家提出了一些简明扼要的批评，但仍然没有对考试的性质、考试对考生的影响以及导致考试实施的政策举措进行详细和批判性的调查。本文通过使用批判性语言测试作为方法论框架，并利用政治演讲、政策文件、测试问题和教师访谈等数据源来弥补这一知识差距。我讨论了测试如何作为事实上的语言政策，作为政府“核心知识”教育议程的一个分支，以简化的语言概念化和有问题的“正确/错误”说话方式话语为基础。我揭示了教师如何谈论考试的“力量”，恐吓和强迫他们接受他们不一定相信或重视的教学法，最终将他们定位为政府保守和规定性语言意识形态的工具。