ABSTRACT

With the coronavirus pandemic, language instructors and students alike were challenged to adapt to new circumstances of learning. Assessment presented an especially difficult challenge as traditional, closed-book tests could no longer be administered without a proctor. In this chapter, we present ways to adapt performance-based assessment rubrics for task-based activities to online synchronous and asynchronous environments in the context of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL). Specifically, we discuss the necessity of avoiding “recipe-following approaches” in order to assess multimodal products more holistically and to incorporate creativity and collaboration into our assessments. In so doing, we align classroom assessment with real-world evaluation of multimodal products. This chapter discusses the challenges and benefits of bringing performance assessments online. We focus specifically on speaking assessment, which is perhaps the hardest skill to address in online environments.