Towards new standards in foreign language assessment: learning from bilingual education

Abstract

ABSTRACTAssessment is one of the most important, purposeful and yet, at times, contentious aspects of language education. Although new strategies of foreign language (FL) assessment have moved away from the traditional summative forms of grammar-based testing to a formative evaluation of learners’ communicative competence in the target language, they are yet to acknowledge the bilingual status of FL learners in their own right. This paper argues in favour of FL assessment moving to evaluate learners’ complete linguistic repertoires and how they engage in bilingual languaging strategies to make meaning, express themselves as whole individuals, and to learn. It begins with an overview of the assessment trends in both FL and bilingual educational contexts, before examining specific elements of the new standards set down by scholars for holistic language assessment in bilingual classrooms that may be of use to the FL classroom.