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The Role Of Language Testing In Supporting Multilingualism
Bessie Dendrinos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

1. Testing and multilingualism: friends or foes?

The most popular language tests, those which are marketed by the big language testing industries, are monolingual projects, with a vested interest to remain so. They are the tests that classroom language teachers are taught how to make as exclusively monolingual products and the exam papers of the international exam batteries always constructed as monolingual instruments, intended to measure test-takers’ language competence or performance in a single language.

There is, of course, a very sound reason for the profound monolingualism of the international testing enterprise. The purpose of tests and exam papers is to measure what is taught, to assess knowledge and skills considered to be of value in language programmes. That is to say, since language education programmes in Europe are still built around the ‘native speaker’ competence ideology –and indeed they are–, it is only natural that language exam papers and tests be developed to assess linguistic competence measured against the ‘ideal native speaker’. This is why assessment criteria of standardised language tests, in particular, commonly focus on vocabulary range, vocabulary control, ability to produce grammatically accurate speech and writing, and skills to understand information directly or indirectly stated.

Teaching and testing are not two sides of a single coin, in the sense that teaching does not necessarily result in learning, and learning does not necessarily require teaching. Yet, there is an interdependency between the two, since the most common function of tests is to measure the outcome of teaching. Therefore, it is only logical that the aims of teaching programmes should change so that testing changes can follow. Of course, it is also true that tests can bring about changes to teaching (especially when high stakes exams are involved), because of the backwash effect that tests are known to have (Shohamy et al., 1996).

Given that teaching and testing are mutually supporting, it is only natural that we expect the aims of both to change focus. Both should shift attention from a monolingual to a plurilingual paradigm. To agree with the authors of the infamous CEFR, i.e., the Common European Framework of Reference for Language (2001: 4):

… the aim of language education [should be] profoundly modified. It [should] no longer be seen as simply to achieve 'mastery' of one or two, or even three languages, each taken in isolation, with the 'ideal native speaker' as the ultimate model. Instead, the aim [should be] to develop a linguistic repertory, in which all linguistic abilities have a place. This implies, of course, that the languages offered in educational institutions should be diversified and students given the opportunity to develop a plurilingual competence.[1] Furthermore, once it is recognised that language learning is a lifelong task, the development of a young person's motivation, skill and confidence in facing new language experience out of school comes to be of central importance. The responsibilities of educational authorities, qualifying examining bodies and teachers cannot simply be confined to the attainment of a given level of proficiency in a particular language at a particular moment in time, important though that undoubtedly is.

In further agreement with the authors of the CEFR (ibid), “the implications of such a shift have not yet been worked out and they have most certainly not been translated into action in either language education or language testing.” The tools produced by the Council of Europe, such as the European Language Portfolio (ELP), are constructed in hope that their use will facilitate the promotion of plurilingualism as it “provides a format in which language learning and intercultural experiences of the most diverse kinds can be recorded and formally recognised” (ibid). Likewise, the CEFR itself is supposed to be used by language professionals as a tool for plurilingual education and competence assessment by helping language practitioners “specify objectives and describe achievements of the most diverse kinds in accordance with the varying needs, characteristics and resources of learners” (ibid: 5).

Despite the noble aim of the Modern Language Division of the Council of Europe (authors of the CEFR), so far the CEFR has chiefly been used for the validation and endorsement of the tests produced by international exam conglomerates. In practice, the CEFR has rarely served as a tool for the promotion of multilingualism or the enhancement of plurilingualism. This, however, should in no way belittle its significant role in testing. It has indeed provided objective criteria (which warrant further investigation) for describing different levels of language proficiency that facilitate the mutual recognition of qualifications gained in different learning contexts, hopefully aiding European mobility. 

The European goal of a truly multilingual topos is still unfulfilled and education has a key role to play, as we rethink language programmes and language testing enterprises, turning attention to the development and assessment of literacies required in an increasingly globalised world, with its diversity of communication technologies and its multilingual contexts in which European citizens operate on a daily level. It is imperative that we look closely at the multimodality of the world in which we have to survive –a world in which multiple modes of meaning are developed, expressed and obtained through the mass media, multimedia, electronic hypermedia, etc. We need to look at the new type of literacy/ies demanded of us –a kind of multiliteracy or rather of multiliteracies, which require new decoding competencies and skills from today’s and tomorrow’s citizens, enabling them to navigate though and interpret a variety of media.

2. The current state of affairs

Language testing is a big industry in Europe, which has been exporting language testing products among and beyond its member states, just as it has been exporting its languages in the form of merchandise and its language services as commodities for many decades. This testing industry sells its produce for the big languages, especially English, but also German, French, Spanish and Italian. Language exams for certification in these languages are available through exam batteries developed for a single language, in a monolingual manner, because to involve a language, other than the target one, would mean less profit given that the tests could not be sold as international products. Since then these testing products do not involve any adjustments to the cultural, linguistic, or other needs of particular markets, it is common practice that the language exams are developed by those who ‘rightfully own’ the language in question, and it is in fact these testers that organisations like ALTE (Association of Language Testers of Europe) accept for membership. That is, British testers are the legal owners and therefore testers of English (e.g. Cambridge ESOL), Spanish testers for Spanish (Instituto Cervantes), French testers for French (Alliance Française), and so on. It is only in more recent years that localised exam batteries are developed for languages other than one’s own. Two cases in point are the Finnish and the Greek national language exams for certification, required as work qualification (hiring, promotion). The Finnish national language exams also include Finnish language tests required for citizenship, which other member states are also beginning to demand. There are also an increasing number of tests, especially in the ‘big’ languages, to certify academic proficiency in the home language of a country where someone wishes to carry out university studies. None of these tests however are developed to measure anything else than the test-takers’ monolingual/ monocultural skills and awareness. The same is true of diagnostic, adaptive e-tests, self-assessment techniques and feedback systems, increasingly available, especially for the ‘big’ languages.

Other, alternative forms of language testing are rare but there is an increasing number of educational and work-related institutions which use alternative forms of assessment, including the ELP mentioned earlier.

3. Challenges and recommendations

As has become obvious from the two sections above, the European language testing industry offers services and is serviced by the ‘big’ languages, leaving the ‘smaller’ ones unattended. This has serious repercussions. If people cannot be certified for their language competence, they cannot be credited for their knowledge. This knowledge is in some way socially delegitimated. Therefore, the first challenge in Europe is to create conditions which provide opportunities for people to be tested and credited for the competences they do have in different languages. One way of achieving this goal is to facilitate the development of localised exam batteries which cater to the needs of the local linguistic job markets. Such samples are now available in few countries in Europe –the Finnish and Greek example already mentioned, there are also interesting ideas by the Dutch testing organisation CITO, and a few others which seem to respond more readily to social language needs rather than aim primarily on symbolic and financial profit.

The second and most serious challenge is to create incentives for the development of examination batteries which test and treat equally a variety of languages, in a comparable manner. Again, localised language exam batteries could perhaps contribute to achieving this goal, as such projects are much more likely to be concerned with the use of language(s) in different social contexts rather than focus on their language commodity as an autonomous meaning system, as international exam batteries have to be. 

Thirdly, but perhaps the most challenging endeavour of all is to shift from monolingual to plurilingual paradigms in language testing and teaching. That is, a paradigm which has its basis on a view of the languages and cultures that people experience in their immediate and wider environment not as compartmentalised but as meaning-making, semiotic systems, interrelated to one another. In a paradigm such as this, there is language switching, ‘translanguaging’,[2] drawing upon lexical items and phrases from a variety of contexts and languages; there is also use of alternative forms of expression in different languages or language varieties, exploitation of inter-comprehension, utilisation of paralinguistic features (e.g. facial expressions and gesture), and generally optimum use of various modes of communication to make socially situated meanings. In this paradigm, where people learn to make maximum use of all their linguistic resources so that they can resort to different aspects of linguistic knowledges and competences to achieve effective communication in a given situational context, cultural and linguistic mediators have a most valuable function. In the absence of a mediator, such individuals may nevertheless achieve some degree of communication by activating their whole communicative repertoire.

Mediation, understood as extracting information from a source text in one language and relaying aspects of it in another for a specific purpose, is an important cultural activity in our contemporary multilingual contexts (Dendrinos, 2006). However, mediation skills and strategies have not found a principal spot in language teaching programmes or international examination batteries, for reasons which are again related to the monolingual practices of European language teaching and testing. This is why, although mediation is included in the CEFR (ibid: 87-88, 99), it has not been possible to come up with illustrative scale descriptors of mediating competence. The only examination battery in Europe which measures test-takers’ performance in written and spoken mediation is the KPG, the Greek national foreign languages examination system, which is mentioned below as a best practice example. 

There are many other challenges if we begin to view teaching and testing within a framework of multilingualism and we should perhaps add multiculturalism. There is the question of teaching/learning materials and test content not as artifacts for cultural indoctrination but as cultural products to raise and measure intercultural awareness. Of course, this means creating projects where such efforts would be valued. If language materials publishing and test preparation is not given incentives to change, the free market is bound to reproduce the dominant ideology which has kept a fertile ground for monolingualism in the foreign language business.

Finally, where language teaching and testing is concerned, one additional great challenge is to collaborate on projects that would help the calibration of language competence descriptors on the basis of the performance of test-takers across Europe, and by extension to help make the CEFR an even more useful tool that it is now.

4. Testing research

Research in testing principally involves issues of validity and reliability, how best to test what it is that is taught or learnt one way or another and how to assess performance in the fairest way possible, how to develop reliable and easy-to-use rating grids. Electronic testing has recently occupied an important chunk of researcher’s time though the main concern here is automatisation and efficiency. There has been limited concern with the effects of tests, testers’ and test-takers’ attitudes and very little critical research around testing. There is even less attention paid to how different testing systems construe cultural reality, the testing subject, etc., which is an area which would warrant investigation, as would research into mediation practices and types of literacies required for and developed for different tests. 

Given the power that tests have (cf. Shohamy, 2001) the most interesting project to be developed in the near future is how to promote multilingualism but also plurilingualism through testing. A European network for multilingualism testing research might be a most valuable project.

5. Conclusions and best practice examples

Assessment of language competence may well be served through means and tools other than tests, such as the ELP. However, given the impact of tests, especially high-stakes national or international standardised formal examination batteries, it is important to reconsider their monolingual orientation.

A best practice example is the Greek national foreign language examinations system (see Annex), which at the moment offers exams in six European languages. Viewing all languages as equal, the testing specifications are the same across the languages which are tested. Following the six level scale of language competence of the CEFR, it is the only high-stakes exam battery which does not abide by the monolingual and monocultural ‘rules’ of the international exam batteries. Rather than focusing on each language and its formal properties, tests are designed with a focus on the use of language in contexts that the language user may be familiar with. It takes an intercultural perspective and measures mediation competence. 

References

Baker, C. (2001). Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Avon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching and Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dendrinos, B. (2004). Politics of Linguistic Pluralism and the Teaching of Languages in Europe (co-edited with B. Mitsikopoulou). Athens: Metaichmio Publishers and University of Athens.

Dendrinos, B. (2006). Mediation in Communication, Language Teaching and Testing. Journal of Applied Linguistics, No. 22. Thessaloniki: Hellenic Association of Applied Linguistics, pp. 9-35.

Garcia, O. (2009). Reimagining Bilingualism in Education for the 21^st century. Paper presented at the NALDIC conference 17. (http://www.naldic.org.uk/Resources/NALDIC/ProfessionalDevelopment/Documents/NQ7.2.3.pdf, July 2010).

Shohamy, E., Donitsa-Schmidt, S. & Ferman, I. (1996). Test Impact Revisited: Washback Effect over Time. Language Testing. November, 13: 298-317

Shohamy, E. (2001). The Power of Tests: A Critical Perspective of the Uses of Language Tests. London & New York, Longman.

Annex: BEST PRACTICE EXAMPLE

Project Title:

KPG: NATIONAL EXAMS FOR THE (GREEK) STATE CERTIFICATE OF LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY