ABSTRACT
It is imperative that a model of multilingual education addresses the question of how to assess multilingual learners. Assessment is an inherent part of the educational process, and a powerful tool for both teachers and students to gain more insights into the competences of the students. At the moment, multilingual learners are being assessed with tests on content (e.g. mathematics, science) that have been designed for monolinguals. Too often, this causes them to underperform because they fail to adequately demonstrate their content knowledge. Multilingual assessment, where the students can use their multilingual repertoires to express their ideas, can address this problem. For example, accommodations such as the provision of a dictionary or a bilingual test, can decrease the linguistic difficulties multilingual students face. In this chapter we analyse the beliefs of Flemish geography teachers in the third grade of technical secondary education regarding their assessment of multilingual learners. The results of ten semi-structured interviews indicate that teachers do recognise the language barriers that multilingual students face and that this insight seems to be a prerequisite for openness towards assessment accommodations. However, the teachers expressed concerns in terms of feasibility, fairness, comparability of test results, and the importance of not lowering the educational level.
