Re-imagining assessment – creating spaces for sustainable multilingual and multi-competence testing

A concern repeatedly articulated in applied linguistics – especially in scholarship on multilingualism and sociolinguistics – regards the assessment of children with multilingual repertoires and life biographies and the lack of consideration in contemporary institutional contexts of their special multilingual competences and ways of languaging. Framing multilingualism as an asset to be capitalised on in the classroom and endorsing diversity and variability as characteristic features of multilingual development, this paper proposes a sustainable perspective on multilingual assessment and testing. The focus of the paper is dual. It highlights the legitimacy and value of multilingual competences, and draws attention to the inadequacies of sedimented monolingualism-informed assessment regimes. The literature review in the first part relays alternative approaches to assessing multilingual students as set forth by recent scholarship. Part II presents a test instrument for the evaluation of multilingual ability in young learners. Recent research in the trilingual region of South Tyrol, Italy found the procedure to unearth unique multilingual skills which tend to go unnoticed in the mainstream classroom.