ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the opportunities and challenges of developing summative assessments for world languages. It explores some current approaches to assessing world languages, including formative and summative assessments. The chapter describes the potential impact of language assessments to provide motivation for students, to guide learners’ self-reflection on their progress, and to inform educators’ approaches to instruction and assessment, which, in turn, can inform their classroom strategies. The wide variety of program models for providing instruction in world languages, coupled with the diversity of languages being taught, means that there are obstacles to having more than just a few nationally available approaches to determining student attainment of world language proficiency. Envisioning such new approaches to the assessment of world languages provides opportunities to engage students in understanding the expected performance, take responsibility for learning, analyze their own strengths and weaknesses, and identify strategies for improvement. The chapter ends with reflections on future directions in world language assessment.
