Review of English language proficiency assessments for young learners; Editors: Mikyung Kim Wolf, Yuko Goto Butler; Publisher: Routledge, 2017; ISBN: 9781138940369; Pages: 295

Abstract

Language assessment has recently attracted a great deal of attention of both researchers and practitioners, which is evidenced, among other things, by a number of well-known monographs (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2010; Coombe et al., 2012; Gordon & Rajagopalan, 2016; Gottlieb, 2006; Komorowska, 2002; Tsagari & Banerjee, 2016, to name just a few), as well as a proliferation of journals oriented towards language testing and assessment (e.g., Language Testing, Assessing Writing, Language Assessment Quarterly, International Journal of Language Testing and Assessment, and Educational Assessment). In recent years, great popularity of computers and easy access to the Internet have made it possible to move testing to a new dimension, through enabling Web-based testing (delivered via the internet) as well as computer-adaptive testing (see Krajka, 2016; Malec, 2018; Marczak et al., 2016). The use of computers has enhanced the assessment of not only target language skills and subsystems, which could be easily predicted, but also more complex constructs, such as intercultural communicative competence (Marczak & Krajka, 2014; Wilczyńska et al., 2019). Formative assessment, often referred to as assessment for learning (Black et al., 2003), dynamic assessment (Shohamy, 2015) or alternative assessment (Alismail & McGuire, 2015; Tedesco et al., 2014) is redefining the way school teachers think about assessment, moving them away from testing towards more comprehensive ways of evaluation. At the same time, even though a great number of publications have appeared on teaching young learners, also with a focus on assessment, this does not necessarily translate into widespread awareness of these assessment issues among teachers. The question might arise, then, whether there is a need for a new publication dealing with the complex nature of language assessment, and if yes, what kind of reader to aim at, how to bridge the gap between what is available and what might be desired, and how to structure it to respond to the changing educational reality.