A social justice research agenda for multilingual assessment in diverse educational contexts

Research and practice in bilingual education have contributed significant insights into teaching and learning from a multilingual stance. Despite these efforts, language and curriculum subject assessment continue to adhere to monolingual practices, not reflecting students' dynamic language use and potentially reinforcing English dominance and linguistic hierarchies. Transforming education practice requires concomitant change in current monolingual approaches to assessment such that multilingual pedagogies can contribute meaningfully to equity and inclusion across K-12, post-secondary and adult education contexts. Empirical research and theory generation in what multilingualism in assessment looks like can address equity and social justice for bi/multilingual students in our diverse sociolinguistic contexts and the teaching and learning needs of Indigenous, racialized and other historically marginalized students. Engaging with this broad research and teaching issue, this narrative review synthesizes recent insights from empirical studies and conceptual scholarship in multilingual education and assessment. We identify the possible conceptual articulations between these two fields that lend themselves to further research, particularly inquiry into how educators can develop and extend multilingual approaches to assessment in bilingual education, to challenge traditional focus on achievement of standardized language norms and isolated skills.