Abstract
“The unbearable lightness of monolingual assessment practices” is Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer and Christian Ollivier’s opening allusion to Kundera in their edited volume, Assessment of Plurilingual Competence and Plurilingual Learners in Educational Settings. It sets a high philosophical bar for what follows. The allusion frames the volume not only as a critique of existing assessment practices but also as a search for something weightier: assessments adequate to the full plurilingual repertoires of learners. It is an aspiration that this collection pursues across European, North American, and Australian contexts. As the closing allegory of “somewhere over the rainbow” suggests, the volume, while showing how much has been done, at the same time helps us understand how far there is left to travel.
The volume’s 15 chapters begin with a brief foreword by Jasone Cenoz, who uses Shohamy’s (2011) continuum of plurilingual assessment as a useful frame for the chapters that follow, helping to categorize a wide range of approaches. The editors’ introduction sets the stage by distinguishing two challenges that the collection tackles: accounting for plurilingual learners within existing assessment frameworks, particularly in content assessments, and developing assessments capable of measuring plurilingual competence as a construct in its own right. Chapter 1 seeks to establish a common terminology and lay out the conceptual landscape for the chapters to come, giving broad overviews of who multilingual learners are, what is assessed, how, and in what kinds of contexts, before the volume turns to more grounded empirical work.
Part I is the longer and more heterogeneous of the two sections. It moves between the two central challenges of the book without always clearly distinguishing them. Chapters 2 through 5 are most concerned with the assessment of content knowledge among plurilingual learners, each foregrounding a specific national context. Chapter 2 examines translanguaging assessment for Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States, arguing that current bilingual tests treat languages as separate systems rather than integrated repertoires and proposing responsive adaptations to literacy and content assessments as a path forward. Chapter 3 turns to Australia, offering a detailed account of national language policy and its consequences for plurilingual learners, pointing to recent translanguaging practices that might open new possibilities for assessment. Chapter 4, set in Canada, brings the issue of context into sharp focus through a comparison of three schools: an Arabic-English school, a French international school, and a monolingual public school. The comparison examines how a digital tool designed to account for learners’ linguistic repertoires functioned differently across the three distinct institutional ecologies. Chapter 5, situated in Flanders, Belgium, investigates language accommodations for science assessments, trialing read-aloud support in the language of schooling or in students’ home languages, and written bilingual tests for primary school students with Polish and Turkish as home languages.
Chapters 6 through 8 close Part I with a somewhat different orientation, turning toward plurilingual language assessment more directly, although the volume’s organization does not make this shift explicit. Chapter 6 reviews two existing approaches to testing multilingualism, including C-test adaptations with polytomous scoring and one example of task-based language assessment, finding that while both are promising, they remain tethered to a narrow bilingual range rather than genuinely engaging in plurilingual or translanguaging repertoires. Chapter 7, set in France, centers on student voices to examine the Atout Langues program, which assesses students in their home languages, rather than the language of schooling. Interviews with two adolescent participants show the importance of official recognition of full linguistic repertoires, while educator interviews reveal the considerable practical challenges of assessment development across multiple and varied languages. A striking example comes from one educator’s account of being tasked with assessing a student’s proficiency in Urdu because of the student’s Pakistani family background. However, the student spoke Punjabi at home rather than Urdu. Chapter 8 argues for the centrality of interculturality to any plurilingual orientation to assessment, contending that culture cannot be disentangled from language when assessing multilingual learners.
Part II turns more fully to the assessment of plurilingual competence, with a more cohesive conceptual orientation and exclusively European contextual focus. Chapter 9 provides a stage-setting overview for the section, structured, similarly to Chapter 1, around foundational questions, beginning with whether or not assessment is necessary at all, what forms of assessment support inclusion, and what linguistic rights students have. These questions productively frame the chapters that follow, even if Chapter 9’s aspirations occasionally outpace its practical specificity. Chapter 10, one of the stronger contributions in the volume, describes a self-assessment tool for plurilingual student teachers in Switzerland, built around a can-do checklist with reflection questions and an affective component inviting students to assess their feelings about using different languages. The clarity of context, purpose, and tool design here gives the chapter weight and helps the reader to imagine ways in which a similar approach may or may not work in different contexts. Chapter 11 examines how the CEFR Companion Volume supports plurilingual assessment through its plurilingual descriptors, making a case for complexity and the descriptors’ utility in defining a construct of plurilingualism for assessment. Chapters 12 and 13 function together, with the former laying out the conceptual framework for EVAL-IC, a scenario-based test of intercomprehension spanning five Romance languages, and the latter describing its implementation in Portuguese higher education. These two chapters represent one of the volume’s most fully realized examples of plurilingual assessment in practice, although the participant pool in Chapter 13 is small and the languages represented are limited. Chapter 14 turns to the European Language Portfolio (ELP) as a case study in both the promise and limitations of portfolio-based plurilingual assessment, offering a thoughtful reflection on why the ELP saw limited uptake and what a more universally applicable portfolio instrument might look like. Chapter 15 is a philosophically ambitious chapter that argues the field has not yet achieved an epistemological break from monolingual assessment, that even assessments designed for plurilingual competence remain at their foundation ultimately monolingual in orientation. The chapter calls for a reconceptualization of languages as ways of experiencing the world rather than as systems of communication, although it offers few concrete examples of what this might look like in practice. The volume ends with a conclusion by the editors that surveys remaining questions and research directions.
As a field mapping of two emergent lines of research, this volume makes a timely and valuable contribution. Melo-Pfeifer and Ollivier have assembled chapters with considerable geographic and methodological breadth that touch on classroom-based formative assessment, large-scale standardized testing, portfolio approaches, and self-assessment tools. Collectively, these chapters highlight the significant potential and pressing need for both multilingual assessment of content areas that better reflect students’ repertoires and language assessments capable of assessing plurilingual competence. At the same time, the contributions demonstrate the real challenges in this work and share an honest reflection on the limitations of different attempts that have been made. This volume comes at a moment when there is an increasing interest in plurilingual assessment and a growing engagement with what translanguaging means for language assessment (Bailey et al., 2025; Hofer & Jessner, 2025; Rodriguez-Mojica et al., 2025; Schissel & Seltzer, 2025; Tian et al., 2025). Varied as it is, the mapping that Melo-Pfeifer, Ollivier, and colleagues present is broadly representative of where the field currently stands.
The scope of the volume, however, also gives rise to some of its limitations. The editors introduce a distinction between two core challenges: assessment of plurilingual learners with unique linguistic repertoires and assessing plurilingual competence as a construct. This distinction blurs across Part I, with the boundary between language assessment and content assessment not clearly delimited. Concerns around content assessment, which surface in Chapters 2 through 5, disappear in Part II, leaving the reader uncertain whether this was a deliberate theoretical choice or an artifact of the volume’s assembly. The fact that multilingualism in content assessment is increasingly attracting interest from researchers across disciplines (e.g., Lee & Orgill, 2025) suggests that this is a discussion that would benefit from more sustained and interdisciplinary treatment.
Despite its wide geographic and methodological reach, the volume’s scope is weighted toward European contexts, and examples of assessment at times tilt toward what might fairly be described as elite multilingualism (Barakos & Selleck, 2019), foregrounding prestige languages and relatively privileged educational settings. The EVAL-IC projects’ restriction to five Romance languages and the ELP’s limitation to the 24 official EU languages are acknowledged in the relevant chapters, and other issues surface as limitations in chapters, but there is little extended discussion about the plurilingual realities of speakers of less common or minoritized languages. Absent are the perspectives from Indigenous language contexts, and few are from refugee and asylum-seeking populations. The editors acknowledge these absences, although the volume would also benefit from deeper engagement with decolonial frameworks, particularly given their relevance to the epistemological shift Chapter 15 calls for. Without these voices, the danger may be that in working to move beyond the unbearable lightness of monolingual assessment, we create instead a plurilingual assessment that becomes unbearably heavy. Once plurilingual competence is translated into descriptors, tasks, or scales, it may acquire the institutional weight of recognition, but also of codification, in which those forms of plurilingualism that are easiest to standardize, aligned with prestigious named languages, or already supported by European policy infrastructures are supported, while other repertoires are further marginalized.
Assessment of Plurilingual Competence and Plurilingual Learners in Educational Settings will nonetheless be of value to researchers and practitioners working on issues around multilingual or plurilingual assessment, as well as to those grappling with how plurilingual competence may be understood. The volume makes a strong case about the need for plurilingual assessment, and it presents a clear look at how much has been accomplished, how much remains unresolved, and the real difficulty of the epistemological shift it calls for. It does not arrive at the rainbow’s end, but it maps the terrain with sufficient range to orient those looking to join the journey.
