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Assessing Multilingual Competence

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Language Testing and Assessment

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Language and Education ((ELE))

Abstract

We live in a globalized world in which immigration, transnational relationships, and technological developments continue to create spaces where speakers of many different languages and cultures interact. These forms of multilingual contact have compelled many areas of research to place multilingualism in the spotlight and investigate the dynamics of multilingual interactions, including how speakers negotiate language differences and how speakers develop proficiencies in multiple languages. Also in the spotlight is the need for valid measures of multilingual competence and multilingual practices. In this chapter, we focus on assessing the linguistic competence of multilingual speakers. We center our discussion primarily around the definition of the constructs in multilingual assessments and on different approaches to measure these constructs. We also highlight how the concept of multilingualism and multilingual competence has shifted; discuss current practices in multilingual assessment and works in progress; identify some challenges in the conceptualization, implementation, and interpretation of multilingual assessments; and call attention to areas in need of further research to develop valid multilingual assessments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Alexis A. Lopez, Sultan Turkan & Danielle Guzman-Orth

Authors
  1. Alexis A. Lopez
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  2. Sultan Turkan
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  3. Danielle Guzman-Orth
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexis A. Lopez .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Elana Shohamy

  2. School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Iair G. Or

  3. Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stephen May

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© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

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Lopez, A.A., Turkan, S., Guzman-Orth, D. (2017). Assessing Multilingual Competence. In: Shohamy, E., Or, I., May, S. (eds) Language Testing and Assessment. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02261-1_6

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