If testing (rather than assessment) continues to prevail as what ‘counts’, and schools measure multilingual learners’ progress from only a restricted accountability perspective- that is from score to score- without considering the other purposes, audiences, and contexts for assessment, what ultimately serves as evidence of learning?

The return to in-person learning at school has prompted the renewal of many pre-pandemic practices, as in the resumption of a testing regimen... but there is no mention of how assessment in multiple languages can provide more accurate information about multilingual learners’ long-term accumulated experiences. 

Lisa Tabaku, Director of Global Languages and Culture at the Center for Applied Linguistics, spoke with DualLanguageSchools.org about the shift in professional development from in-person to online during the pandemic -- and what's next. 

Does the presence of multimodalities confound comprehension of text in testing situations, especially for multilingual learners? In this blog, we explore three of many ways multimodalities can positively impact classroom assessment for multilingual learners.