42nd Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC)
Assessment in Multilingual Contexts: Models, Practices, Policies & Challenges
For many individuals and communities in our changing and globalized world, multilingualism has become the norm. The theme of LTRC2021 wishes to tackle the many issues and challenges that we face as assessors of language ability in multilingual environments.
Assessing this construct across multiple languages, for example, and doing so equitably, fairly and responsibly, is a complex institutional challenge; assessing the language competence of multilingual individuals is a similarly complicated undertaking. It requires not only test adaptation, but also innovation in design, and novel views on how to tackle that challenge.
How do language testers respond to the myriad of theoretical and empirical approaches that currently attempt to address these issues? How do language teachers cope with the assessment of multiple languages present in their classrooms? Why is it challenging for test designers to define the construct, to assess and to score language assessments in multilingual contexts? How do immigration officials or administrators, and immigrants and newcomers handle institutional language demands? How do we deal with high status languages that dominate those of lower status in institutional contexts? And what does all this mean for the assessment of language ability?
The aim of LTRC2021 is to bring together researchers from around the world to address critical themes in assessment in multilingual environments.
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