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The increasing influence of sociocultural theories of learning on assessment practices in second language education necessitates an expansion of the knowledge base that teacher-assessors need to develop (what teachers need to know) and related changes in the processes of language teacher education (how they learn and develop it). Teacher assessors need to acquire concepts from diverse assessment paradigms; they need to learn to use these concepts in developing, using and analysing assessment procedures and results; they need to exercise critical perspectives on their own assessment practices for particular purposes in diverse contexts, especially in seeking to do justice to all in education. This paper argues that, to develop language assessment literacy with the dual goals of transforming teacher assessment practices and developing teacher understanding of the phenomenon of assessment itself and themselves as assessors, it is necessary to reconsider both the knowledge base and the complex processes of language teacher education. It draws on projects the author has conducted on developing and investigating teacher understanding and practices in second language assessment, to discuss the need to work with the often tacit preconceptions, beliefs, understandings and world-views about assessment that teacher-assessors bring to teacher professional learning programs and that inform their conceptualisations, interpretations, judgments and decisions in assessment. It discusses the need in developing language assessment literacy for processes that develop teacher-assessors' capability to explore and evaluate their own preconceptions so as to become aware of how they interpret their own assessment practices and their students' second language learning. Through these processes they develop a deeper understanding of the interpretive nature of assessment and their own self-awareness as assessors. [Author abstract, ed]

This wide-ranging survey of issues in intercultural language teaching and learning covers everything from core concepts to program evaluation, and advocates a fluid, responsive approach to teaching language that reflects its central role in fostering intercultural understanding. * Includes coverage of theoretical issues defining language, culture, and communication, as well as practice-driven issues such as classroom interactions, technologies, programs, and language assessment * Examines systematically the components of language teaching: language itself, meaning, culture, learning, communicating, and assessments, and puts them in social and cultural context * Features numerous examples throughout, drawn from various languages, international contexts, and frameworks * Incorporates a decade of in-depth research and detailed documentation from the authors' collaborative work with practicing teachers * Provides a much-needed addition to the sparse literature on intercultural aspects of language education  

Scarino explains why teaching of culture has always played an important role in the teaching of languages. Traditionally, it has been presented as the \"cultural component,\" which was generally separate front and subordinate to the teaching of the language itself. This cultural component frequently comprised a generalized body of knowledge about the target country and its people, ranging from literature and the arts to aspects of everyday life. Although this body of knowledge was intended to enrich students' understanding of the target language, it remained external to and separate from the students' own first language and culture. It was not intended that students would engage with this cultural knowledge in such a way that their own identities, values, and life-worlds would be challenged and transformed.

With globalization and advances in communication technologies, the movement of people and their ideas and knowledge has increased in ways and at a pace that are unprecedented. This movement changes the very nature of multilingualism and of language, culture, and language learning. Languages education, in this context, needs to build on the diversity of languages and other semiotic modes that learners bring to the classroom, as well as their diverse biographies and trajectories of experience, knowledge, language, and culture. Equally, the context demands a reconceptualization of the role of teachers of languages. Teachers enact the teaching of particular languages in their local context as members of distinctive multilingual and multicultural communities. They bring their own particular repertoires of languages, cultures, and histories of experiences that shape their frameworks of knowledge, understandings, values, and practices. It is these frameworks of interpretive resources that they use in mediating language learning with students who, in turn, use their own interpretive resources. In this article I draw on collaborative research with teachers of languages to investigate teacher understanding of the preconceptions, often tacit, that they bring to their teaching practice in the diverse interlinguistic and intercultural contexts of primary and secondary school education in Australia. I describe an expanded view of language, culture, and learning, the three fundamental concepts in languages education. Discussion follows on debates about the appropriate knowledge base and whether discourses about \"learning to apply formal knowledge\" and \"best practice\" in teacher professional learning are sufficient to assist in the development of teachers' capability to interpret their own teaching and learning practices and their students' learning as acts of reciprocal meaning-making in the context of local and global diversity.

Transformations associated with the increasing speed, scale, and complexity of mobilities, together with the information technology revolution, have changed the demography of most countries of the world and brought about accompanying social, cultural, and economic shifts (Heugh, 2013). This complex diversity has changed the very nature of communication within and across languages, in society in general, and in education. These changes in turn require a reconceptualization of our approach to language/s education in ways that recognize a diversity of goals for people from different backgrounds, people who are learning a variety of languages in diverse settings and who may be interested in developing different capabilities and achieving different outcomes. In this article, we address the reconceptualization of the goals and outcomes of learning additional languages and processes for their formulation and realization. We will make explicit the educational values that underpin our position. Recognizing the immense diversity that the learning of additional languages in diverse contexts encompasses, our consideration is necessarily conceptual. The point of departure for our discussion is communicative language teaching, the dominant paradigm for language teaching for the past 40 years. We briefly trace its historical development and provide an account of some of the conceptual and theoretical expansions since its initial formulation. In light of this expansion we then discuss goals for learning additional languages by: (a) reaffirming the multilingual character of communication and learning to communicate, focusing on the exchange of meaning, (b) (re-) inserting the importance of personal development and aesthetics, and (c) recognizing the centrality of reflectivity and reflexivity in communication and learning to communicate. We conclude with a set of principles that are intended to capture the expanded nature of goals and their rendering for the purposes of teaching and learning.

Teachers of languages, as well as educators in general and employers, increasingly recognise the importance of developing intercultural capability. This recognition, however, brings the question of how this is evidenced as an outcome of learning. The assessment of this capability poses a range of theoretical and practical challenges. I begin with a description of languages learning within an intercultural orientation and a model for understanding assessment. I then discuss issues of conceptualising and defining the construct, as integral to the process of assessment. Next, I consider issues in eliciting intercultural capability in a proposed framework that includes assessment as both communicative performance (elicited in ‘critical moments’) and meta-awareness (elicited in commentaries). To conclude, I discuss issues related to identifying and judging evidence of the development of the intercultural capability and warranting the inferences made about students' developing understanding. The discussion is based on the experience of ongoing studies investigating the assessment of the intercultural capability in learning languages and in international education.

This chapter presents two case studies in which the authors explore issues of data elicitation in two contexts (secondary school and university) and a number of foreign languages (French, German and Indonesian). The authors examine not only the students' responses, but also the way in which teachers conceptualised the construct of intercultural competence. [Editorial, ed]

This chapter explores the assessment of intercultural capabilities in language learning. It frames assessment as a cycle that involves conceptualising, eliciting, judging, and validating as a process in which each part of the cycle interconnects with and influences the others. Using this cycle, the authors present a discussion of assessment that is not simply a set of procedures but a way of working. They argue for an overall orientation to assessment that foregrounds a qualitative paradigm as a way of engaging with intercultural capabilities in language learning. Quantitative paradigms are not sufficient and part of the difficulty in assessing has been an over-reliance on traditional modes of assessment without considering their relevance to encompassing, expanded understandings of language and cultural capabilities. It recognises that learners develop distinctive capabilities related to 'moving between' languages and cultures. The chapter adopts a multilingual approach that recognises that languages constitute a repertoire in which all languages are relevant and necessary for understanding learners' capabilities. This challenges models of assessment driven by tests and scales developed within a monolingual frame. The chapter foregrounds short- and long-term perspectives and the need to move beyond viewing assessment as episodic to seeing it as situated within ongoing learning.