Educational and professional assessment of knowledge and skills have been strongly associated with 'standards'. The use of standards or proficiency benchmarks in language assessment in test-driven systems, broadly speaking, presupposes at least a degree of 'buying-in' on the part of test-takers and test-users (e.g. university admissions tutors). The buying-in is premised on (a) the perceived usefulness of the standards involved, and (b) the standards have universal and stable validity (however defined) within the domain concerned. The marketing values of assessing language with reference to some undisputed standards, particularly in relation to the English language (as an additional/second language), have been in no small measure associated with the promotion of Standard English (e.g. Quirk, 1990). The description and projection of Standard English have, however, been largely exemplified by representations of formal lexico-grammatic features at sentence or clause levels in monologic and dialogic texts. There is also eliding of citational forms of high-status pronunciation conventions (e.g. Received Pronunciation, General American Pronunciation or Educated Australian) with Standard English. Furthermore, it is now becoming increasingly clear that the ideal-type English language proficiency, as operationalized in many large scale international English language tests, is referenced to a narrow seam of language used by middle-class speakers in public and professional contexts (Leung, in press). The public face of language proficiency tends not to include the language of conflict or intimacy.
The growing research in flexible and fluid use of languages in multiethnic-multilingual social interaction suggests that such putative qualities of universality and stability should not be assumed. In this presentation I will discuss relevant questions triggered by the notions of plurilingualism and plurilingual mediation from the CEFR, and also from aspects of language use in translingual community interpreting. I will pay particular attention to the highly contingent, situated and unpredictable nature of participant uptake in multilingual interactional language use that are implicated in both plurilingual mediation and translingual community interpretation. The use of speakers' multilingual repertoire flexibly for real-life purposes to facilitate peer-to-peer communication involves more than invocation of language knowledge, it also calls forth an exercise of sensitivity and sensibility in respect of, inter alia, access to message content and language support (for others), and in-group face maintenance. Such online decision making in situ far exceeds issues of language knowledge and skills, and established descriptions of social conventions of language use. The interactional flux may call for communicative 'one-offs'. The Hymesian dictum of factum valet come to mind. Externally introduced language standards are unlikely to be able to account for the complex and diverse ways in which participants initiate and respond to situated multilingual communication. I will conclude with some thoughts on possible ways of handling contingency and fluidity in assessing multilingual interactional communication.
Leung, C. (In press). Language Proficiency: From Description To Prescription And Back? Educational Linguistics.
Quirk, R. (1990). Language varieties and standard language. English Today, 6(1), 3-10.
