Critical review of instruments of multilingual learner assessment

• In Event: Building and sustaining a searchable, open-source database on l1-based multilingual education research

Proposal

The purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary analysis of the 130 publications that were identified as pertaining to the assessment of multilingual learners’ literacy/ies and the tools of assessment. Depending on who, what, and how we assess, assessments reflect a certain view of education and can yield a “symbolic power” (Bourdieu, 1991; Shohamy, 2014) in shaping the delivery of education. In other words, assessing only in a dominant language steers the curriculum and instruction as well as shaping stakeholders’ views of what is important in an education system. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the existing assessment tools in language and literacy. My goal in this analysis is to evaluate to what extent the assessment tools used in studies of MLE in the past ten years take into account the multilingual reality of the learners and their contexts, as opposed to being “mechanisms” that “affect, change, and perpetuate de facto monolingual policies” (Shohamy, 2006: 175) in dominant languages.

In this paper I critically examine the design and purpose of the range of different instruments of assessment represented in the database publications. I attempt to identify the beliefs and sources of knowledge about multilingualism and language in education behind the design and usage of, for example, large-scale assessments, evaluation of a classroom, student continuous assessment, or teacher training feedback. Finally, I examine the rising number of publications that propose the idea of multilingual assessment for multilingual learners, analyzing the beliefs behind this idea and how it may shape and inform pedagogy and the structure of schools.

Author

• Erina Iwasaki, Teachers College, Columbia University