Revisiting the Past to Shape the Future: Assessment of Foreign Language Abilities

Introduction

As an integral part of instructional endeavors, assessment is basically defined as the activities assigned to learners by teachers in order to diagnose learning proficiency, or achievement, which are directly influenced by their learning experiences (Cheng, Rogers, & Wang, 2007). In doing so, assessment is not only important for ascertaining the achievement of educational objectives but also for the continuity in improvement and learning progress. However, assessment is not an unequivocal process because assessing learner performance cannot be isolated from the socio-historical frame of reference in which it prevails (McNamara, 2000). To that end, assessment has undergone a change in time emanating from one paradigm to another.

In order to discuss the current trends in foreign language assessment, it will be helpful to review the brief history of development of language testing both in terms of theoretical and practical perspectives. Assessment of language constructs started with discrete items, which were language skills for the case of foreign language assessment. It was followed by integrative assessment, which was later furnished by communicative testing. Since testing trends were evolved around the major theme of ‘language learning as a dynamic process’, assessment of language abilities was remarkably shaped by the notion of a robustly defined criterion, waving between criterion- referenced and norm-referenced testing. Therefore, different facets of language constructs and intertwined variables could then be assessed in order to have a more comprehensible view of foreign language abilities.

In doing so, traditional assessment was concerned with the language product in order to define learning weaknesses, which was conducted at the end of the language course, and thus, labelled as summative assessment. However, the shifting paradigm has shown that language learning is regarded as a process; therefore, it has mushroomed as a need for more dynamic and authentic assessment methods. This situation has traversed the assessment concerns to formative and/or continuous assessment. What is more, some alternative methods are also favored by educators, practitioners and researchers in the field, such as peer-assessment, portfolios, self-assessment (Poehner & Inbar-Lourie, 2020).

With this in mind, the assessment of foreign language abilities within a diachronic perspective by responding to some basic questions will be revisited below concerning the facts that:

• 1.

  Has foreign language assessment been shaped by a new conceptualization in a recently changing educational landscape? If so, should educators reshape their foreign language assessment practices by means of futuristic methods?

• 2.

  How should educators select the best method for assessing their students’ language abilities? And then, how should educators revision their assessment procedures in the classroom environment in line with various methodological frameworks and epistemologies?

Valuing the paramountcy of foreign language assessment, this chapter specifically embarks on reflections from classroom practices in order to improve teachers’ (language) assessment literacy by demonstrating different assessment types and methods forecasting the future of foreign language assessment which is mostly molded by new language teaching and learning methods to demonstrate practitioners how they can make the best out of their assessment practices. Finally, addressing both theoretical and practical issues in foreign language assessment, recommendations for future directions will be noted in order to empower quality language assessment, as well.

Lay Of The Land: Where Were We?

Assessment of language learning has been the focal point of myriad of researchers, syllabus designers, test developers, and teacher-testers. Thereof, it is a vital component in the educational process as it is serving for different purposes such as achievement, progress, diagnostic, among others. As language assessment refers to “the act of collecting information and making judgments on a language learner’s understanding of a language and his ability to use it” (Chapelle & Brindley, 2002, p. 267), it is an interpretation of the taker’s ability to utilize some aspects of language. And, it has long been assumed that assessing foreign language abilities has been doomed to the notion of an “idealized” native speaker although a broader angle of the language construct has been dealt by assessment experts without any preliminary concern of who the language user is.