The Language Assessment Process: A Multiplism Perspective

According to the author of this article there is a process that must take place for all language assessments. Here are the steps:
1. Determine the purpose of the assessment
2. Define language knowledge to be assessed
3. Selecting the assessment procedure
4. Designing items and tasks
5. Administering the assessment tool(s)
6. Determining the quality of the language sample/answers produced
7. Assessing the quality of the procedures
8. Interpreting the results
9. Reporting the results

To me this list should help a teacher who is struggling with formalizing the process of giving authentic assessments.

When I read the title of the article my first thought was 1) Is Multiplism a word? and 2) What does it mean. The author goes on to say that deciding which assessment tool to use depends on the purpose of the assessment and on how language knowledge is defined. She suggests that the use of a "multiplism" approach to language assessment, whereby multiple options are available at each phase of the assessment process.

The article discusses some of the same things as the test design chapter from the McNamara book---such as discrete point testing, and how the purpose of these assessments measure skills based type of language acquisition, rather than communicative competence. The types of assessments that the author recommends are the same as the authentic assessments we have been reading about.

The phases of assessment that I was particularly interested in learning about were the ones that had to do with what you do after you administer the assessment. Such as the multiple ways you can interpret and report results. I think having an assessment conference is a great idea. I also like the idea of reporting in the form of a narrative, rather than just giving scores or grades etc.

Basically, what I got from reading this article, is that there are some basic processes that should be done when giving assessments, but there are multiple ways of doing these phases that can and should be done depending on the purpose of your assessment.