Translanguaging Pedagogies for Multilingual Learner Assessment

There is substantial linguistic diversity amongst students in Melbourne Australia and these students’ competencies also span across languages. Despite this, assessment in schools are most often monolingual English practices. The languages that students have in addition to English are, in most cases, left at the school gate and their valuable multilingual skills are generally not utilised or celebrated in any meaningful pedagogic way or considered when assessing students. Reducing assessment to English-only disadvantages multilingual learners by ignoring the full range of language skills that these learners have and also failing to acknowledge their content and conceptual knowledge and understandings in languages other than English. Although there is an increasing awareness of the need to include learners’ home languages in classroom practice, it is not common place, and in most cases has not extended to the assessment of learners. Translanguaging pedagogies have much to offer education practice and assessment by connecting the entire repertoire of a student’s linguistic skill-set with their overall learning. Doing so brings languages into the classroom by recognising, valuing and building upon the many different language skills of students to enrich their learning. Within this chapter, translanguaging pedagogical approaches are explored through examples of practice designed for a linguistically and culturally diverse primary school context. The examples of practice draw on the varied multilingual abilities of students, and by integrating their linguistic repertoires into classroom learning, students use their multilingual skills as learning resources that can also be acknowledged in assessment. In sharing these, the potential of translanguaging to add an important lens to student assessment is revealed.