Translanguaging in Content-based Assessment

Dr. Ronan Kelly, Queensland University of Technology, Queensland

A few years ago, a multilingual student shared their experience of school assessment with me during a research project:

Joanna: I was learning for a test... I didn't know any English to answer the questions. I wrote it in Polish and the teacher was so nice that she took a Polish person to translate it and gave me the marks… the other questions were fine. I was answering them in English, but it was just that one question I struggled so much… I made the decision. I was just like “F*** this” I’m writing it in Polish because I knew it and was so frustrated that I knew it, but I couldn't just put it on the paper. (Kelly et al., 2025, p.6)

Joanna’s experience as a secondary school student in Northern Ireland opened up several questions for me: What is the relationship between language and content knowledge in school assessments? If the main purpose of a task is to assess students’ content knowledge and skills, then shouldn’t they be able to use all of their linguistic and multimodal resources (i.e. translanguaging) to show what they know and what they can do? And what would it look like if we had more planned and systematic approaches, beyond improvised peer translation, to support translanguaging in assessment?

The last question is what my colleagues and I are currently researching. Multilingual students bring diverse linguistic and multimodal resources to schools, but their learning is often assessed using monolingual (English-only) and monomodal (written-only) approaches. These types of assessments won’t generate complete and valid information on multilingual students’ knowledges and abilities. If decisions about future educational opportunities and support requirements are based on incomplete and invalid assessments, there’s a need to change the assessment.

This is where translanguaging comes in. Translanguaging theory takes the view that multilingual students make meaning and communicate using their whole repertoire of linguistic resources, along with visual, gestural and other non-linguistic semiotic resources (Li, 2018). Rather than using languages separately and switching between them, multilinguals draw on all the meaning-making and communicative resources available to them within a single integrated system. Bringing translanguaging into our assessment practices means creating opportunities for multilingual students to use all their diverse linguistic and multimodal resources to show what they know and what they can do. This could create a range of benefits including positive impacts on students’ achievement, language development, motivation and emotional wellbeing. It can also help teachers to better understand multilingual students’ learning and potential support requirements – they can tell if some students need support with linguistic understanding, content knowledge or both.

So, what does a translanguaging assessment look like? Or what should a teacher do when it’s not possible for them to know all the diverse languages that multilingual students bring to school? How can they assess work that’s not in English?

Translanguaging assessment does not mean assessing students in their home language only. Instead, it means creating opportunities for students to flexibly choose how to best use their full range of multilingual and multimodal resources. Translanguaging assessments often involve support from digital tools (e.g., Google Translate or multimodal writing apps) and opportunities for interaction with teachers, peers or families. One example in a science classroom might involve students creating a video where they demonstrate and narrate an experiment by flexibly using the language resources that they feel most confident with. Students could develop transcripts for the video in English and their home languages, using Google Translate or generative AI for support. Multilingual learners have the capacity to be flexible, critical and pragmatic users of digital translation tools (Kelly & Hou, 2022). This assessment approach involves multiple languages and modes with visuals, gestures, spoken language and written language. Assessing all of these resources holistically will generate a more in-depth and valid picture of a multilingual student’s content understanding. To support interpretation of translanguaging assessments, teachers can draw on a range of supports and resources including colleagues, families, school communities, generative AI or machine translation apps.

Ensuring that multilingual students have opportunities to develop the English required in the curriculum remains vitally important in translanguaging assessments. The science assessment task could involve supporting students to create multilingual glossaries with the key subject specific vocabulary in English and their home languages. Multilingual students might feel more confident using key words from their home languages when narrating their experiment, they might then follow this up by writing the English subject specific vocabulary beside their home language words in the transcript. This means that students will be able to draw on their full range of linguistic and multimodal resources, and the teacher will be better able to gauge students' understanding of the content. 

Taking a translanguaging approach to assessment is still quite new in schools across the world. There are challenging questions where we haven’t completely figured out the answers yet. Some of these are around the additional time and resources required, reliability of generative AI and translation apps and readily available examples of good practice. Multilingual students themselves and their parents might prefer the use of English at school. If translanguaging potentially supports more complete and valid content-based assessments for multilingual learners, then these are challenges we should work towards addressing through collaboration between students, teachers, families and communities.

Teachers might start by rethinking one classroom assessment task. Where is there an opportunity for translanguaging in this task and how could it be assessed? Developing and sharing these examples of good practice within and across schools can help create more complete and valid assessments for multilingual learners.

References

Kelly, R., & Hou, H. (2022). Empowering learners of English as an additional language: translanguaging with machine translation. Language and Education, 36(6), 544–559. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2021.1958834

Kelly, R., Hou, H., Skinner, B., & Stewart, M. (2025). Perezhivanie and Multilingual Adolescents’ Development of School Belonging in Northern Ireland. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2025.2457143

Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039

Dr Ronan Kelly is a lecturer and the TESOL Study Area Coordinator at QUT. He has worked as a teacher, program coordinator and teacher educator across Australia, Northern Ireland, Hungary, South Korea and Vietnam. His research focuses on digital technologies and assessment in multilingual education contexts.