Rethinking certification

International language certification has become a highly prized part of the internationally mobile student’s CV. It replaces home produced tests (such as university entrance tests) in numerous contexts, and it has high face value. But it is often not particularly relevant to local needs, since the global dimension it operates in requires it to be politically correct, and to make use of universally acceptable topics and texts. It is also costly, and may come with a short expiry date. In addition, the wide range of English language products on the market, all ostensibly testing at the same level, and all validated against the CEFR, but extraordinarily different in their structure and assessment procedures, can make it difficult for test takers and even schools and language centres to make choices about which certification is most appropriate in a given context. This article reports on an ongoing project in rethinking certification to make it more answerable to local needs. It describes a co-certification, introduced in Ca’ Foscari in 2005, in which a local institution, the University of Venice, joined forces with an international testing board, Trinity College London, to produce a version of the latter’s test of Integrated Skills in English. This test has been consistently perceived by students to be more relevant to their needs than the international version of the test, or other certifications. The decision by Trinity in 2014 to revise the structure of the international test brings with it the opportunity to revise the co-certified version, and the chance to engage with a construct informed by English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), reflecting the reality of non native speaker academic interaction in Europe – a challenge which McNamara (2011) describes as ‘urgent’.