Language Assessment: Past to Present Misuses and Future Possibilities

• In Event: 65.043 - Bilingual and Multilingual Education: Current Practices and Future Prospects for Promoting Justice, Culture, Language, and Heritage in Education

Abstract

In this paper, the authors call for changes to our current assessment practices based on monolingual testing policies. Assessment in bi/multilingual education has largely been determined by ideologies towards immigrants and their languages. Throughout the past century, immigrants’ knowledge of the dominant language(s) of nations has played a central role in their immersion in nation-states, entities rooted in an ideal of homogeneity, uniformity, collective ideology, and monolingualism. Immigrants have been expected and required to integrate and make efforts to become members of “the nation”. With regard to language, this has meant that immigrants and their families, adults and children alike, were—and still are—expected to acquire, master, and adopt the new language(s) of the nation in subtractive ways, by dropping their home languages to instead function in “the new” and prestigious language.

Because immigrants and other minoritized groups have historically been far more vulnerable to testing misuses than others, the authors assume a critical stance on language testing policies for immigrant adults and children. Through an historical review of testing in various countries, the authors document many cases of misuse, abuse, and other injustices as testing serves as “a tool to create and/or reinforce societal divisions, marginalization and discrimination.” They examine monolingual intelligence testing, high-stakes standardized testing in schools, and citizenship testing in many contexts around the world as examples. The authors also demonstrate the power of testing in creating language education policies by limiting opportunities for bilingual education, promoting language standardization, and setting expectations for uniformity in language learning. Moreover, they call into question the validity and reliability of monolingual tests for immigrant emergent bilinguals.

They maintain that language testing has fallen out of step with new translanguaging research in applied linguistics that highlights the complex, dynamic and fluid ways that bilinguals actually use their languages, and suggest that this new research should guide the next wave of language assessment research and practices. As an alternative approach, the authors argue for bi/multilingual testing that allows emergent bilinguals to use language flexibly, creating affordances for home languages as well as practices in the new language. Empirical research shared in this presentation suggests that the use of multilingual assessments significantly contributes to higher scores on academic tasks and more accurately reflects the knowledge of bi/multilingual test takers. This is because what the authors term here “dynamic assessment” allows emergent bilinguals to use their entire linguistic repertoire flexibly and creatively to process and produce language for academic purposes, through various procedures such as mediation and displaying test questions simultaneously in two languages. Rather than suppress students’ home language practices, given the power and prestige of language tests, dynamic, multilingual assessments not only offer more accurate information about students and improve their outcomes, but also serve to raise the prestige of students’ home languages in schools and society. Such bi/multilingual tests, the authors claim, “offer a new direction for creating tests that are more relevant, that minimize the misuses [and] biases, … and that more accurately show what emergent bilinguals know and can do.”

Author

• Elana Shohamy, Tel Aviv University