Digital multimodal composing as translanguaging assessment in CLIL classrooms

Abstract

Background: Despite the increasing popularity of translanguaging as an instructional strategy and the ascending linguistic and cultural diversity in CLIL classrooms, content assessment remains monolingual and monomodally carried out in written language. There is a critical need to explore how translanguaging assessment can be designed and enacted through assessment innovations. Aims: This paper explores innovative use of digital multimodal composing (DMC) as translanguaging assessment in CLIL classrooms and the pertinent practical issues associated with such innovation. Sample(s): The participants were three content teachers and their students in three distinctive classroom contexts. Methods: With an instrumental case study design (Yin, 2003), this study presents three situated examples of DMC as translanguaging assessments with a combination of thematic and multimodal analysis. Results: The findings show that the teachers enacted translanguaging assessment through DMC in three ways: using DMC to relate abstract/intangible curricular constructs to students’ lived experiences, imagined identities and cultural heritages, to document longitudinal learning evidence throughout the process of real-world explorations, and to help diagnose the implicit and sometimes overlooked sources of conceptual misunderstandings and difficulties in content learning. A range of challenges in relation to validity and manageability are also identified. Conclusions: While the findings reveal the affordances of DMC as translanguaging assessment, its implementation requires attention to the planned scaffolds for translanguaging performance in DMC, the digital literacies required for effective use of DMC, and well justified purposes of using DMC as translanguaging assessment in linguistically policed contexts.