A scoping review of literature in multilingual assessment in higher education

Abstract

Recent research regarding internationalized higher education has recognized that although English is commonly used as the medium of instruction, students and teachers are highly multilingual. While there have been calls to transcend the limitations of being English-centric, the need to reconceptualize assessment practices to cater to the needs of multilingual learners has received much less attention. This scoping review synthesizes 28 existing theoretical and empirical studies on multilingual assessment in higher education, identifying the focus areas of the literature. Findings were categorized into the following themes: (1) bibliometric characteristics of the included studies (2) theoretical underpinnings; (3) operationalizations of the theoretical models of multilingualism in the included studies; and (4) the advantages and disadvantages of multilingual assessment and stakeholder perspectives. The review also identifies areas that have been under-researched, highlighting the need for future research to develop more multilingual assessments that evaluate content knowledge, consider more multilingual contexts and languages outside of English, and bridge the gap between research on multilingual assessment that has been conducted in primary and secondary schools and higher education.

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