Assessment of the knowledge and competences of plurilingual learners

Plurilingual education portal

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Starting activity

Your school has just received a 12-year-old child who has been educated in his country of origin, but who doesn't yet speak the language of schooling. Your colleagues are meeting to establish a way of assessing the student's previous skills in three subject areas (mathematics, geography and history) in order to integrate him into a specific school year. Think about how you would proceed to evaluate the student's knowledge and competences and how you would decide on which languages to use in that process. Furthermore, also consider whether language(s) in the newcomer student repertoire is the only issue to take into account in the evaluation.

Objectives

At the end of this section, you will be able to:

define what the assessment of plurilingual students entails;
identify contexts where plurilingual assessment formats in education might make sense and be justified;
list some possibilities to integrate plurilingual assessment formats in education.

Keywords

Linguistic hierarchies, epistemic hierarchies, cognitive injustice, symbolic violence, test accommodation.

Introduction: plurilingual assessment for social and cognitive justice

It is well known that any group of learners, in any context, is heterogeneous. It can be due to different motivations or learning strategies, due to having different pre-knowledge of school subjects or due to different relationships with languages. These can be the languages of schooling or the language in which knowledge of certain subjects is transmitted, to give just a few examples. Now, because language is central to the transmission and construction of knowledge, its little mastery also has an influence on students' motivations, the learning strategies they can develop and the way they can mobilise (or not) their pre-knowledge. Thus, the use of plurilingual pedagogies has been advocated to support greater affective and cognitive involvement of students who do not have the language of schooling as their L1. However, although the more or less systematic use of these pedagogies and teaching-learning strategies is already recognised by teachers (especially language teachers), the use of plurilingual assessment formats still tends to be seen as an ‘eccentricity’. This is the case for diagnostic (to inform teachers, at the beginning of the year, about the current status of knowledge), formative (in continuous assessment to monitor the learning processes) and summative assessment (at the end of the year or of the school cycle, through a quantitative grade).

Let's start with the obvious power of testing: “tests are powerful (…) because they are imposed on all students in all schools, with no way of resisting them” (Shohamy, 2006, p. 93). And they are imposed in a standardised way, both in terms of design (including in a single language), format and the reading of the results. Following Melo-Pfeifer & Ollivier (2025), “even when school systems recognize the unfair monolingual assessment system, accommodations for plurilingual students are most often limited to structural accommodations (more time to take the test or allowing the use of translation tools or dictionaries), but without questioning students’ abilities to use those tools and the very monolingual framework design of the tests, in which the answers are monolingual, just as the students' answers are expected to be” (Melo-Pfeifer & Ollivier, 2025, following Abedi, 2013). This means that teachers do acknowledge the challenges of assessing plurilingual students but are still implementing rather monolingual accommodations and accommodations that might not meet students' previous literacy practices (such as using a dictionary).

In this section of the Wikiversity, we will present some theoretical and ethical assumptions that justify the use of plurilingual assessment formats. The main argument is that the use of such assessment formats combats cognitive injustice and makes the assumptions of plurilingual inclusive education more coherent by bringing plurilingual teaching-learning and assessment strategies closer together.

Assessing the plurilingual student: theoretical and ethical starting points

From the outset, every student could be considered plurilingual, since the definition of plurilingual competence encompasses knowledge of different varieties and registers and is not limited to productive competences in different languages (it can include partial and receptive competences, for example). The plurilingual learner profile dealt with in this section is that of children and young people in a situation of mobility (forced or not) who arrive in a new country or region with no knowledge (or little knowledge) of the language of schooling, as in the initial reflection situation. We can expand it to encompass children growing up in multilingual regions, whose family languages and language(s) of schooling are not coincident.

When a child joins a new educational system in a different language, assessment difficulties may not be limited to language skills. Firstly, the curricula of the different school subjects are different in different national and/or regional contexts, so when assessing, the perspective of the host country overlaps with that of the country of origin, creating a situation of knowledge hierarchy. Such a situation can lead to epistemic hierarchy, since some knowledge is considered in the assessment process as more important than others (the knowledge included in the host country's curricula). In addition, the tests use cultural references that may be unfamiliar to the newly arrived student (even if the linguistic terms are recognised): the example of the expression ‘bean bag’ included in the wording of a maths test reported by Mahoney (2024, p. 113) shows this inequality:

“We discovered that the two international students (India, Saudi Arabia) had never thrown a bean bag and were unfamiliar with any games related to bean bags. But the 14 domestic students had all thrown a bean bag previously. These types of cultural referents may make the assessment more comprehensible to students from mainstream US culture!” (Mahoney, 2024, p. 113).

Furthermore, assessment formats in many contexts tend to reproduce hierarchies in terms of literacy models (for example, knowledge is more highly valued when expressed in writing), with an almost exclusive valorisation of written literacy and the ‘culture of paper’ and text production. However, plurilingual students have not always been schooled and educated in this written-centered culture, so multimodal assessment, on top of plurilingual assessment, models should be considered.

There is also the fact that the plurilingual student is not only dealing with a new language, but potentially also with different assessment cultures: the type of exercises proposed, the nature of the answers expected, the type of language used, the length of the tests, to name but a few.

In this sense, an epistemic hierarchy is joined by a linguistic hierarchy in the process of assessing plurilingual students. Firstly, it should be noted that education systems tend to (re)produce the perspective that education systems are eminently monolingual, despite the fact that they are attended by plurilingual populations. Thus, monolingual teaching and learning methods and monolingual materials are joined by monolingual assessment formats. The plurilingual student therefore sees the use of all their skills and competences limited, reducing the expression of their knowledge to the language of the test, which can be seen as a sign of cognitive injustice. Even when this student has undergone (intensive) lessons to learn the new language and shows signs of understanding the statements, “test developers should be aware that the productive and receptive language skills of MLs [multilingual learners] develop differently, and that this may interfere with their ability to engage with a test” (Mahoney, 2024, p. 11).

To this injustice we could add the exercise of symbolic violence, since, at least in cases of forced mobility, plurilingual students may be obliged to express their knowledge in a language with which they have a negative emotional bond. As a whole, the use of monolingual assessment models is a sign of linguistic inequality, i.e., gaps “that arise in part due to practices and structures informed by monolingual mindsets, standard language ideologies and deficit beliefs about linguistic diversity and multi/plurilingual practice” (Erling & Moore, 2021, p. 6). Some examples of this inequity:

a newly arrived migrant kid at school is evaluated with mainstream assessment forms, based on the sole use of the language of schooling,
DaZ (German as a second language) students (in the German context) have to perform as if they were Deutsch L1-students to get the same grades in subjects other than language-centered.

Based on the arguments listed above, we could say that the use of plurilingual assessment methods has the potential to reduce symbolic violence in testing situations, mitigate cognitive injustice and reduce linguistic and epistemic hierarchies.

Plurilingual assessment in practice: voices from the teachers and ways forward

Plurilingual assessment means “incorporating multilingual elements into assessments, whether they are content-related or language-related” (Vogt & Antia, 2024, p. 11). It is possible to list diagnostic, formative and summative assessment practices that are plurilingual in nature. These practices can make use of plurilingualism in the formulation of questions in test statements (making it easier to understand the content being assessed) and in the acceptance of plurilingualism and the use of multimodal elements (such as diagrams or drawings) when answering questions (making it easier to express the knowledge acquired). The plurilingualism of the test can also be seen in the combination of the wording of the questions and the answers (Melo-Pfeifer & Thölkes, 2022, p. 226).

Now, this type of accommodation, even when addressing particular linguistic needs, does not support the fully plurilingual and multimodal expression of the individual. Students might be entitled to:

“native language testing” (Abedi, 2013), meaning being tested in the L1 despite this not being the language of schooling;
“multilingual-by-translation testing” (De Angelis, 2021), i.e., having one or several translated version(s) of the “official” test being given to the other students;
linguistically simplified versions of a test in the language of schooling, meaning a test which presents a streamlined version of the language (less coordinated sentences, for example) or/and with linguistic scaffolding (such as synonyms or definitions).

In the first two formats, the presence of a linguistic mediator could be required. These formats are nevertheless also monolingual and do not challenge the monolingual habitus in assessment (De Angelis, 2021). In this sense, plurilingual students could be encouraged to combine their linguistic and other resources to showcase their knowledge, since knowledge may have been built up in different languages throughout potentially successive mobility processes. Cenoz (2024, p. xiii) proposes a continuum model that illustrates the possibilities of integrating and using plurilingual assessment formats. The continuum illustrates increasing openness to plurilingual practices in assessment, which emphasises the need to:

move from rigid, additive models of assessment (just using more than one language) to more integrated, dynamic models (translanguaging).
shift from accommodation to empowerment, where students are not just being helped to cope with a monolingual system but are actively encouraged to use their full linguistic repertoire.

Despite a certain embrace of plurilingual teaching-learning strategies, results from the PEP with mostly foreign language teachers in Europe project showed that teachers are more sceptical about using plurilingual assessment. To the question ‘do you use plurilingual instructions in assessment’, 27,7% of the 800 respondent (language) teachers indicated a complete absence of plurilingual practices, whereas the remaining 56.2% incorporate plurilingualism in their assessments at some point or in some manner (see Figure 1).

Moreover, plurilingualism in language education and testing is more prevalent in the formulation and explanation of instructions than in the languages permitted for responses.

When it comes to providing instructions and/or explanations in multiple languages, 8.19% of teachers reported doing so in all cases, while 18.12% reported doing so in the majority of assessments. Overall, 67.38% of respondents incorporate plurilingual practices into their instructions and supplementary explanations, while 17.72% stated that they never engage in such practices (see Figure 2).

Recognising the gap between plurilingual teaching-learning practices and the use of strategies in assessment processes is important because, as they are used little or not at all in a growing culture (and even fetishisation) of assessment as a control and accountability strategy (making teacher responsible for student results), this invisibility of plurilingual formats reinforces the disdain for minority languages and the sole valorisation of curricular and school languages. As Mahoney says, ‘if it's not tested, it's not taught’ (2024, p. 15). In other words, the inclusion of plurilingual formats in assessment could reinforce and legitimise the systematic introduction of plurilingual pedagogies in education.

Take home messages

For the sake of coherence of plurilingual teaching practices in education (which include planning, implementation and assessment), plurilingual assessment has to be considered, in diagnostic, formative and summative moments.
Plurilingual assessment formats of newcomer students allow them to showcase their subject-specific knowledge, without linguistic limitations, and is therefore aligned with recent calls to address social and cognitive justice in education.
In foreign language teaching and learning, plurilingual assessment formats can be used to showcase students’ full linguistic repertoires, which are needed to act and collaborate in specific plurilingual situations (see evaluation of plurilingual competence).

Self-assessment

1. Although plurilingual pedagogies are already being implemented in education, the assessment of plurilingual students still tends to be monolingual.

True
False

2. Plurilingual students’ language difficulties are the only obstacles to their assessment in school.

True
False

3. Plurilingual assessment should be limited to translating test prompts into several languages.

True
False

4. The use of plurilingual assessment formats increases the plurilingual student’s chances of expressing the acquisition of knowledge.

True
False

Resources to go further

Mahoney, K. (2024, 2^nd edition). The assessment of multilingual learners. Multilingual Matters.

Melo-Pfeifer, S., & Ollivier, Ch. (Eds.) (2024). Assessment of plurilingual competence and plurilingual learners in educational settings: Educative issues and empirical approaches. Routledge.

Shohamy, E. (2001). The power of the tests. A critical perspective on the uses of language tests. Harlow: Longman.

Bibliography

Abedi, J. (2013). Accommodations in the assessment of English language learners. In A.J. Kunnan (Ed.), The Companion to Language Assessment. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118411360.wbcla059

Cenoz, J. (2024). Foreword. In S. Melo-Pfeifer & Ch. Ollivier (Eds.), Assessment of plurilingual competence and plurilingual learners in educational settings: Educative issues and empirical approaches (pp. xi-xvi). Routledge.

Cortés Velásquez, D. et al (2025). Language use in secondary and higher education: Teachers’ beliefs and practices. Survey Report. PEP Project URL https://sites.google.com/view/pepproject/accueil.

De Angelis, G. (2021). Multilingual testing and assessment. Multilingual Matters.

Erling, E., & Moore, E. (2021). Socially just plurilingual education in Europe: shifting subjectivities and practices through research and action. International Journal of Multilingualism. DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2021.1913171.

Mahoney, K. (2024, 2^nd edition). The assessment of multilingual learners. Multilingual Matters.

Melo-Pfeifer, S. & Ollivier, C. (2025). Plurilingual assessment. In C. Ollivier & S. Melo-Pfeifer (Eds.), Encyclopedia of plurilingual education. Peter Lang (open access).

Melo-Pfeifer, S., & Thölkes, M. (2022). “Wie soll ich das Kind bewerten?”: between standardization and differentiation in the assessment of refugee students. A qualitative study of foreign language teachers’ representations in Germany. In G. S. Levine & D. Mallows (Eds.), Language Learning of Migrants in Europe: Theoretical, Empirical, Policy, and Pedagogical Issues (pp. 219-243). Springer.

Shohamy, E (2006). Language policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches. Routledge.

Vogt, K., & Antia, B. (Eds.) (2024). Multilingual Assessment – Finding the Nexus?. Peter Lang.

Credits

This resource has been created by Projet PEP (discuss • contribs) (Erasmus+ project, co-financed by the European Commission) : Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (Universität Hamburg) & Christian Ollivier (Université de La Réunion).

Portal: Plurilingual education