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The pedagogy favoured by English teaching implicitly seeks to reproduce the dominant culture whilst through its students it maintains the status quo. However, it is increasingly becoming popular to question such pedagogies. Questioning such pedagogies is one way of disrupting the culture of dominance, thus prioritising the legitimacy of local cultures. This further creates understanding of the discourses that inform students’ interaction with knowledge construction and reception. This paper analyses a challenge test, an entry test, given to potential BA Honours students. Grounded in critical pedagogy, the paper argues that the adoption of norm-referenced assessment as opposed to criterionreferenced assessment has placed English as a gatekeeping mechanism. The analysis reveals that the lecturer continues to exercise dominance. Furthermore, following ethnographic thick description of the motivations and contexts that inform the students’ writing, the paper postulates that the assessment downplays the discourses represented in the texts. This reveals the imperialistic agenda that is embedded in the comments given by lecturers. The paper thus reveals how the assessment reflects the hegemony of English offering. Thus, adopting critical pedagogy brings into focus the contradictions that mainstream pedagogy fosters in inculcating the culture of student subservience whilst promoting the bureaucratic elitist position of the lecturer.

Linguistic imperialism in English assessment: The case of an historically black university in South Africa