Recently proposals have begun to be made for a plurilingual perspective on assessment but the idea of what constitutes plurilingualism in assessment remains under-developed. For some authors, it is simply a recognition that language assessment takes place in multilingual contexts; such a view however, does not draw on or develop learners' multilingualism in the assessment process. For Shohamy (2011), there are at least two senses: (1) enabling learners to use all the languages in their repertoire to demonstrate their knowledge and (2) the notion of 'multilingual functioning', which suggests an understanding of the students' capability to mediate/function successfully in the actual exchange of meanings across languages and cultures. We argue that learners in the context of learning and using additional languages are developing specific capabilities that we call multilingual and 'intercultural', seeking to reference the reality of moving between languages and cultures. In doing this we will consider the reality of plurilinguality in educational, and life environments and the need for plurilinguality and interculturality to be captured in assessment through an elaborated conceptualisation of the nature of plurilingual and intercultural practices in the interpretation, creation and exchange of meanings. In thinking through plurilingual assessment in the context of additional language learning it becomes clear that a plurilingual orientation to assessment is a pluralistic endeavour that attends to the contextualisation of students, their languages, and their language learning. What assessment looks like will vary according to which languages are in play, for which purposes they are being assessed, and for which purposes they are being learned. It involves an ecological understanding of the languages that students bring to their learning and to the assessment and how these languages are understood and valued within local linguistic ecologies of society and schooling. This ecology establishes the setting in which the assessment is undertaken and in which the students' work is assessed. Plurilingual assessment therefore depends on the type of program and the purposes of assessment; it is not a unitary phenomenon with a single assessment architecture. It also becomes clear that the conceptualisation of the construct needs to be revisited to tease out the implications of the diversity of assessment and how plurilingual capabilities are best understood in the context in which the assessment occurs. This conceptualisation needs to go beyond questions of plurilingual 'performance' to include how the processes of communicating in and through languages is recognised, understood, and mediated by learners in their learning and in their communication. This requires a more expansive view of assessment that dislodges long-established assessment practices to open spaces for new ways of understanding both the what and the how of plurilingual and intercultural assessment.
Shohamy, E. (2011). Assessing multilingual competencies: Adopting construct valid assessment policies. 95(3), 418-429. doi:doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01210.x
