Issues, Challenges, and Future Directions for Multilingual Assessment

Abstract

Multilingual teaching and learning practices are often implemented in K-12 classrooms. However, issues related to multilingual assessment are rarely investigated. With the growing population of multilingual learners in the classroom, there is a great need to understand what multilingual assessment is and how to assess students who come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The current study attempts to fill the research gap by reviewing the assessment literature over the past 15 years on multilingualism. We summarize and synthesize three main themes: 1) issues related to multilingualism, 2) difficulties, and challenges of multilingual assessment, and 3) approaches to assessment for multilingualism. We further divide the third theme into five subcategories: ideological shift, new ways of measuring English language proficiency, translanguaging-based assessment, dynamic assessment, as well as incorporating qualitative research. The study introduced the challenges of implementing multilingual assessment, offers an overview of the different approaches, and calls for more work to be conducted using the approaches.