Assessing language proficiency around the world | LARC 2025

Plenary speakers:
Antony Kunnan
Cecilia Guanfang Zhao (University of Macau)

Link to Presentation Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11w__...

In the last 75 years, the field of language assessment has benefited from research conducted on language assessments in English and a few European (French, Spanish, and German) and Asian languages (Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin). At the same time, there has been disregard of language assessment practices around the world that could inform our theories, practices, and policies. In this talk, we editors propose to share plans and challenges for a new volume titled Assessing Language Proficiency around the World (Wiley, 2026), in which 50 prominent and lesser-known languages will be discussed. This collection will be a major update to Volume 4 of The Companion to Language Assessment (Wiley, 2014), with an effort to provide a fair representation of world languages and a renewed focus on global inclusivity. There are many challenges in producing this volume. The first is one of contextual diversity. Languages are situated in varied contexts due to historical, social, political, and economic reasons. For example, there are official monolingual contexts (Australia, Austria, Iceland, and Portugal), bilingual contexts (Canada, Philippines, and Kenya), trilingual contexts (Belgium and Luxembourg), and multilingual contexts (Singapore, Switzerland, South Africa, and India). Within these contexts, there are also many indigenous and vulnerable or endangered languages. Positioning different languages within these contexts would have important implications on discussions of assessment practices.

The second challenge is working out the structure of the chapters. Most chapters will follow a structure that includes an overview of the language (geographical spread, language status, home/public use), general linguistic features (lexico-grammatical systems, discourse patterns), language in context (public use of the language, mono-/multilingual society), teaching and learning systems (schools, colleges), assessment systems (educational, professional, and governmental policy areas), research on assessments (validation, fairness), and new or future initiatives. Some chapters, however, will have a modified structure based on their unique individual contexts.

The third challenge is presenting the chapters in appropriate groups. In the 2014 edition, chapters were grouped by continents rather than by language families. In this collection, chapters will be grouped by language families that reflect genetic relationships between languages. This approach is valuable for understanding linguistic features and assessment needs. For example, Indo-European languages share grammatical structures that may influence assessment design and tasks, such as cloze tests. Thus, chapters will be presented in six major language family groups: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Afro-Asiatic, and Dravidian. Within these major families, chapters will be grouped by sub-families (e.g., the Indo-European language family will have sub-groups such as Celtic, Germanic, Indo-Aryan, Balto-Slavic, etc.).

Overall, it is expected that knowledge of policies and practices of language assessments in their respective contexts will prompt the field to theorize and implement language assessments from context-dependent and language-specific perspectives. Assisting us in this endeavor are associate editors Ahmet Dursun, Lynda Taylor, and Nguyen Thi Ngoc Quynh, and editorial assistant Coral Yiwei Qin.