Multilingual Assessment – Finding the Nexus?

Karin Vogt, University of Education Heidelberg, Germany
Bassey Edem Antia, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Multilingual assessment – Finding the nexus?

In recent decades, the world has seen unprecedented levels of mobility, resulting from globalization of information, people, organizations and capital. Societies have become more and more diverse around the world, linguistic diversity included. These developments have had a significant impact on education, both general education and language education, and they necessitate reviewing curricular paradigms, approaches and practices in many contexts, albeit for different reasons. However, the pressure to rethink educational arrangements in non-Western contexts has come less from mobility and more from a critique of the hegemony of Western modernity.

What the various educational contexts and geographical settings have in common is their need to be critically assessed and re-examined in order to account for multilingual realities both in society and in the (language) classroom. Revised epistemologies have to address these realities that also exist in education on various levels and in diverse educational contexts.

The paradigm associated with the extensive body of work on educational assessment has largely been illustrated by a monolingual database (Schissel et al., 2019; Shohamy, 2011), whereas a significant part of the research corpus on multilingual education articulates around teaching and learning, and has only infrequently foregrounded formal, non-spontaneous assessment. The foregoing seems to be a reality both for language pedagogy as for content teaching.

There is no unanimous definition of multilingualism as a widely used term. Definitions highlight the social dimension of the term (e.g., Conteh & Meier, 2014) or a more individual perspective, e.g., Herdina and Jessner (2002, p. 52) who see multilingualism as “(…) the command and / or use of two or more languages by the respective speaker”. In many recent conceptualizations of multilingualism, the aspect of challenging language separation ideals is inherent as well as a perspective on language use in which speakers activate their entire linguistic (and non-linguistic) resources in order to communicate (e.g., Angolevska, 2022; Cenoz & Gorter, 2014; Krulatz et al., 2022; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Mohanty, 2018).

Research on multilingualism and conceptualizations of multilingualism are heterogeneous and diverse, so much so that Heugh et al. (2016, p. 4) prefer the term “multilingualism(s)”. They argue that multilingualism depends on the setting and the context, making it multidimensional and multi-scaled. In fact, the dynamic nature of research in the field of multilingualism has resulted in new terminology, spanning from heteroglossia (Bailey, 2012; Bakhtin, 1981), plurilingualism (Council of Europe, 2020; Hélot & Cavalli, 2017; Seed, 2020), polylingualism (Jørgensen, 2008), to translanguaging (García, 2009; Li & García, 2021; Ortheguy et al., 2015), all of which, according to Ibrahim (2022, p. 39), deconstruct and de-dichotomize monolingual terminology and discourse.

Retaining the term “multilingualism” as a generic term for our conversation, the multiple definitions of the term entail different dimensions which can be seen as a continuum in order to express its complexity and the various concepts involved (Cenoz, 2013a). Coming from a European perspective, Cenoz identifies the individual vs. social dimension, the proficiency vs. use dimension, and the bilingualism vs. multilingualism dimension (pp. 5–7).

In some, mainly post-colonial settings, the layered hierarchies of languages play a significant role, and Heugh et al. (2016) underline that inequalities are structured through these hierarchies of local, regional, national and/or international languages. In these contexts. the social indexicalities of languages, following the experience of colonialism, politicize languages and foreground issues of social (in)justice and (in)equity correlating with particular language arrangements (Antia, 2017, 2021).

In numerous educational contexts, linguistic realities and lifeworlds of many learners are not always taken into consideration (Angolevska, 2022; Ouane et al., 2011; Van Avermaet et al., 2018), due to a monolingual paradigm being deeply rooted in teaching and learning and in language learning as well (Cummins, 2019; Greenier et al., 2023). This is also true for assessment.

Institutional learning environments have to consider linguistic lifeworlds in education and in assessment. In the present volume, we would like to focus on two educational settings. These are content instruction and assessment, with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as a specific, mostly European-based type of content instruction. Content is either taught in a language of instruction that is the majority language or a language that is the prestigious language of schooling, depending on the context, with learners bringing in their linguistic repertoire to access the content more easily (Antia, 2017; Duarte et al., 2021). Content instruction itself might be multilingual, using several languages in a formal instructional context, and based on a more holistic or heteroglossic conceptualization of language (Banda, 2018; De Angelis, 2021). The second focus of this volume is language instruction encompassing the language of instruction, a second language, or an additional language or foreign language that represents both content and means of communication in the classroom. The aim of multilingual approaches in these educational contexts is to scaffold language learning and enhance its outcome by enabling learners to use their multilingual repertoires to access the languages and enhance communication in different languages, the target language(s) included, thus softening the boundaries between languages to the benefit of the language(s) in question (Cenoz & Gorter, 2013a; Weideman et al., 2021). Terms like additional language teaching (Kopečková & Poarch, 2022; Prilutskaya et al., 2022), L3 teaching (Travers, 2022) or foreign language teaching (e.g., Falk & Lindquist, 2022; Mayr, 2022; Yamada, 2022) are used. The terminology used depends on the context and on the degree to which the paradigm shift of the multilingual turn, the dynamic turn (Flores, 2017) or the post-multilingual turn (Li Wei, 2016) have been completed. Foreign language instruction has to be seen as a special case of language instruction, particularly in European and North American contexts, and against the background of linguistic ideologies and paradigms that are only slowly changing.

If we take a learning-oriented assessment approach as a basis (e.g., Jones & Saville, 2016; Turner & Purpura, 2016; Saville, 2019), how is assessment shaped while underscoring its alignment to both teaching and learning?

In its widest sense, multilingual assessment can be understood as incorporating multilingual elements into assessments, whether they are content-related or language-related. In our view, a distinction has to be made between the multilingual assessment of content, multilingual assessment of a language repertoire and multilingual assessment of (named) languages. This distinction is in line with Seed (2020), who suggests a similar classification for assessment in plurilingual situations. In the language testing field, calls to embrace multilingual approaches in language testing are voiced by scholars like Shohamy (2011) or Ortheguy et al. (2018). They attempt to have tests include learners’ multilingual repertoires in their constructs to reflect multilingual lifeworlds and the paradigmatic shift to multilingual languaging (Schissel et al., 2019). In the South African context, the needs of multilingual students in assessment have begun to be recognized (Antia, 2021; Weideman et al., 2020). From a social justice perspective, discrimination of multilingual practices as well as marginalization of (certain) multilingual speakers are to be contested by multilingual assessment. This demand resonates with the multilingual realities in South African higher education institutions as depicted in Susan Coetzee-van Roy’s (this volume) study of the diverse language repertoire of a South African student body. The call for these realities to be recognized and adequately translated into assessment practices is intended to promote educational equity. There are scholars like Schissel et al. (2019) for whom the idea of languages being separate entities within an individual speaker is no longer adequate, neither conceptually nor operationally. They recognize the challenges that this conceptual shift entails for language testing and particularly for defining multilingual constructs for assessment, and, even more demanding, for language testing. Shohamy and Pennycook (2019) take a step further and voice the necessity for tests that are multimodal and multisensorial (p. 36) so as to elicit information on the entire array of semiotic resources used by learners to communicate. This resonates with the philosophy of the action oriented approach in language teaching as advocated in the Companion Volume to the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2020).

Against the background of a holistic, dynamic view of multilingualism and multilingual assessment, approaches to multilingual assessment so far concern multilingual approaches to comprehension in assessment (e.g., presenting content in the student’s own language rather than in a majority language in an achievement test), multilingual scoring (e.g., multilingual rubrics), test accommodations (e.g., including multiple languages in response options or bilingual assessment forms), translanguaging approaches in assessment, and formative assessment (Antia, 2017, 2021; Antia et al., 2021; Gorter & Cenoz, 2017; Schissel et al., 2018, 2019; Wang & East, 2023). The need to integrate a broader model of language use into (language) assessment (Toohey, 2019) on the one hand and the aim of aligning learning, teaching and assessment e.g., in learning-oriented assessment on the other hand could be catered for by formative assessment procedures and the deployment of cross-linguistic mediation.