ABSTRACT
Assessment has sometimes been likened to “the tail that wags the dog”. In other words, what we assess ultimately reflects what we consider to be most important. Assessment, therefore, solidifies the main purposes of a training or educational program-what we anticipate to be the outcomes, what participants are expected to know or to be able to do. Unfortunately, there is often a mismatch between assessment process and content, the assessment tools and strategies employed, and the objectives set forth. Stated another way, the assessment process and content, and tools and strategies employed, do not adequately nor appropriately measure what they should. Clearly, the purposes of training and education and the outcomes assessed must be inextricably linked; unfortunately, this is not always so in practice. This is especially the case when attempting to assess a complex phenomenon such as intercultural communicative competence (ICC). A survey of intercultural communication courses in fifty American universities (Fantini 1997)
and nearly 100 ICC assessment tools (Fantini 2006: Appendices F and G) reveals just this-that in many cases, course objectives and assessment processes are inadequately connected. And where external test instruments are also employed, many of these have a bias embedded that may or may not align with the course objectives. This bias arises from the particular view of intercultural competence held by the developers of the external tool, sometimes an incomplete or partial view, and often one that may or may not support the objectives set forth by trainers and educators. For these reasons, assessing intercultural competence is both an interesting and a challenging task, and many trainers and educators continue to search for better ways to monitor and measure the development of ICC in their participants. Hence, although assessment may be “the tail”, an examination of evaluative processes and
content must start with “how” intercultural competence is conceptualized and the search for a definition of ICC that is holistic and complete: what is ICC? And what are the components that together contribute to such competence? Although these may appear to be basic questions, they are important ones, as a search of the literature and analysis of available assessment tools revealed a surprising array of responses to these questions, ones that are fundamental to our field, to our practices, and therefore to the assessment process itself.
