Does Language Testing Need the Native Speaker?

Opinions differ on the importance of the native speaker's concept for language teaching and testing. This Commentary maintains that it is important and seeks to explain why. Three types of grammar are distinguished, the individual's, the community's and the human faculty of language. For first language teaching and testing it is the community's grammar that matters, an idealised grammar as represented by the standard language. The native speaker is, it is suggested, a stand-in for the idealisation of the standard language, and since the standard language is the goal for both first and second language education, equivalent control by the second language speaker is a possibility. This Commentary therefore refutes the fundamental difference hypothesis.