Current Thinking

All classroom language teachers regularly engage in various forms of assessment in order to understand their learners’ abilities, identify areas in need of remediation, and evaluate the effectiveness of instruction, among other purposes. Many professional organizations and government agencies also administer language assessments. These are typically, although not always, formal standardized tests. Since the 1970s, a great deal of research into language assessment has been conducted and the community of language assessment professional has been growing. Large-scale studies and research as well as classroom-based studies is published in several discipline specific journals such as Language Testing and Language Assessment Quarterly and of course in monographs and edited volumes, and is presented at professional conferences such as the annual meeting of the Language Testing Research Colloquium, special sessions at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and TESOL International and other conferences.

The following points capture many of the key ideas and beliefs shared by language assessment professionals. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. It is intended only to provide a basic orientation to the ways in which language assessment is currently conceived.

1. Information-gathering: Language assessment is a process of determining learners’ knowledge of and abilities in the language of study. This includes learners’ areas of strength as well as those areas in need of further development .
2. Integrated: Assessment should go hand-in-hand with teaching and learning and is best conceived as an ongoing process.
3. Formative: Assessment involves diagnosing learners’ areas of difficulty – as well as their strengths – and this can inform subsequent teaching and learning.
4. Multiple tools: Various assessment instruments may be used to understand language learning, including tests, portfolios, and performance tasks.
5. Multiple agents: Language assessment can be conducted by classroom teachers (internal assessment) or by external bodies (external assessment) such as testing agencies (e.g. Hanban for the HSK Proficiency Test for Chinese; The Goethe Institute for German Zertifikat Deutsch, ETS for The French Proficiency Test (FPT) and many others).
6. Impact on teaching and learning: Assessments, especially those considered to be high-stakes, such as many large scale standardized tests, effect teaching and learning practices. Although assessments are often intended to reflect curricular goals and content matter, in extreme cases they may actually shape the curriculum and dictate what to teach and what to learn. The TOEFL Test is one of those high-stakes tests for English.
7. Critical perspective: Stakeholders in the assessment process are encouraged to view assessment critically by questioning the uses of tests and other assessment tools and by critiquing the values and beliefs upon which assessment tools are based and the purposes they serve.

Next section: Assessment Terminology