Protesting the monolingual habitus in assessment: Using L1-based and multilingual assessment to show what learners can do

• In Event: Multilingual approaches to language planning, pedagogy, and assessment

Proposal

The assessment of learners has traditionally relied on single dominant languages; most international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) still do, even while gathering data about the ethnolinguistic diversity of those being assessed. In recent years, the field of educational development has accepted the need for L1-based multilingual education, or at least initial literacy learning in the L1—yet has continued to promote monolingual assessments that use only the dominant language, which is learners’ L2 or L3. Such assessments tend to result in low scores, especially in the early primary grades, when students cannot (yet) respond accurately in the dominant language, even if they know the answers. Monolingual assessments are designed for proficient speakers of those languages, not for learners whose intersecting conditions of indigeneity, ethnicity, gender, religion, income, rurality, and home language(s)—their intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2017)—put them at risk for educational as well as other forms of marginalization.

In the spirit of protest that guides CIES 2024, this paper describes conceptual research that combats the monolingual habitus or ideology that underlies assessment in dominant languages from the classroom level through the national level to international large-scale assessments. Adopting a multilingual habitus can create ways to see learners’ languages, literacies, experiences and knowledges not as problems but as resources to be built upon (Ruíz, 2010). If learners are indeed viewed as emergent multilinguals who are developing multiple literacies (García et al., 2008), then assessing in the L1 will show the range of skills they are developing that will be available for interlinguistic transfer. Given time and exposure to both/all languages, learners will transfer from their L1 phonological awareness (sound-symbol correspondence), specific linguistic elements (e.g. vocabulary), pragmatic aspects (e.g. meaningful gestures), conceptual knowledge (e.g. photosynthesis), and metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies (e.g. comparison/contrast) to their new language(s) (Cummins, 2005; 2009). This process requires time and facilitation, and a focus on meaning-making.

Both interlinguistic transfer and a focus on meaning-making have important implications for assessment. Traditional monolingual forms of assessment require accuracy, which ignores the fact that errors are part of language learning, and that high proficiency in a new language may not be a reasonable goal of education at the primary level—particularly if that language is not widely spoken in learners’ communities. Assessing new academic content knowledge in the L1 or multilingually will give learners the best chance of expressing what they are learning. In addition, qualitative assessment measures like the use of rubrics characterize what learners can do along a scale that allows for errors and translanguaging—both of which are consistent with research on how children learn languages and literacies based on meaning-making rather than on abstract decoding and memorization.

This paper brings together scholarship on multilingual learning and assessment. It describes a range of strategies for formative and summative assessment of learning in bi- and multilingual settings such as Cambodia, Nepal, the Philippines and South Africa. Finally, it demonstrates glaring issues with existing large-scale assessments like the Early Grade Reading Assessment. The final analysis will suggest ways forward for national education systems with multilingual learners whether or not they are in L1-based multilingual education programs.

Author

• Carolyn J Benson, MLE International