Asian Association for Language Assessment

Over the years, the social, cultural, economic, and technological  forces in our daily lives, in education, and at work have placed  enormous demands on individuals to develop and deploy a range of  competencies in order to be able to build and maintain relationships,  access and manage goods and services, build and share knowledge, and  work collaboratively for the social good (European Commission 2018;  Gordon Commission 2013; Ontario Ministry of Education 2016: Organization  for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2003, 2019). As a result,  the notion of “competency” has long served as an organizing principle  for determining if educational efforts have succeeded in producing  citizens with the skills needed to contribute meaningfully to society.

In the context of second and foreign language (S/FL) education,  competencies have also been proposed in many contexts as a basis for  second and foreign language (S/FL), where curricula and assessment might  be organized around competencies such as the ability to summarize and  synthesize information, or the capacity to solve problems  collaboratively.

Critical to the development or successful deployment of these real-life  competencies are obviously the fundamental linguistic resources of  communication (Purpura & Dakin, 2019). However, successful  communication in most language use situations involves much more than  linguistic resources; it also requires the ability to marshal topical  resources, contextual resources, socio-cognitive resources (e.g.,  learning, reasoning), affective resources (e.g., engagement, focus),  social-interactional resources (e.g., collaborating), and in current  times, technological resources (Purpura, 2018). Given this complex  landscape, how might we reimagine the kinds of assessments we use in  both standardized and classroom contexts to mirror the sociocultural and  sociocognitive practices of situated S/FL use?
In order to shift  perspectives on assessment, this talk will argue that traditional  language-based, independent and integrated skill-based, and task-based  approaches to S/FL proficiency assessment can be useful in certain  assessment contexts; however, they are not actually engineered to  measure S/FL proficiency in contexts of “situated” S/FL use – that is,  where goal-oriented task accomplishment is located within a  sociocultural context, and where the ability to accomplish simple and  complex tasks is embedded within the mediated engagements and social  practices of a particular community (Purpura, 2021).

To argue this, I will first recount a common, real-life collaborative  problem-solving anecdote for consideration. This scenario is used to  show how the various features of the event require examinees to engage  different resources to perform successfully, thereby confirming the  utility of “scenario” as a technique for assessing S/FL proficiency. I  will then examine different approaches to assessing proficiency,  highlighting the interpretative value of each. I will end the discussion  by showing how a learning-oriented approach to assessment (LOA)  (Purpura & Turner, 2018) can serve as a comprehensive conceptual  assessment framework for converting “traditional” assessments into ones  that are scenario-based and learning-oriented.