The field of assessing language competencies has recently matured in both the scope of research questions it addresses and in the range of research methods at its disposal for addressing these questions. However, research is still struggling with issues related to the definition of the nature of language skills and how the results from assessments can be best related to educational measures (Bachman 2000). The symposium aims at addressing current challenges in assessing language competencies of children and adolescents from the perspective of educational research and at discussing new advances in the area of language testing.

Three current challenges connected to the increasing demand for assessment-based educational evidence will be focused in the symposium. First, there is a growing need for high-level foreign language proficiency within European countries. Language skills of young foreign language learners are however difficult to test. Second, there are increasing numbers of students whose native language(s) is (or are) different from the language of instruction. Interactions of these two aspects – foreign language learning by multilinguals – further amplify the complexity of current scenarios for language assessments (Daller 2011). In addition, and related to, these challenges posed by the dynamics of the purposes for assessing language competencies and by the developments of their structural and individual conditions, the assessment methods and techniques are progressive as well. Technology-based modes of assessment are the cutting edge in test development and provide opportunities, and also new challenges, in empirical research on language competencies.

In the first contribution of the symposium, Ingrid Gogolin and Joana Duarte present an overview on the research state-of-the art, relating to a newly established focal research program in Germany entitled ‘Multilingualism and language formation/ Mehrsprachigkeit und sprachliche Bildung’. This cluster of projects is tied by the joint endeavour of empirically investigating the research question of whether migration-induced multilingualism bears benefits for both individuals and societies and draws on different methods to assess language proficiencies of multilinguals with different backgrounds. These will be presented.

Andrea Haenni Hoti and Sybille Heinzmann reflect on the assessment of oral skills in English as a foreign language in a large sample of young learners. The concepts of achievement and learning progress will be outlined from a communicative perspective and sample tasks developed within a large-scale longitudinal study in Switzerland will be presented.

Drawing on research from language acquisition, Marion Döll addresses the particular issue of migration-induced multilingualism for language testing and will review the types of tests in Germany and Austria used to assess multilingual adolescents. Her conclusions also refer to needs and requirements of knowledge on language assessment within teacher training programmes.

In the final contribution, Frank Goldhammer, Ulf Kröhne and Carolin Hahnel provide an overview of advances in technology-based assessments of language competencies, and detail the possibilities and implications of using TBA for language testing with two selected empirical examples of reading assessments: a study of speed-ability tradeoff in word recognition and sentence verification, and an investigation of construct validity of the Digital Reading Assessment from PISA 2012.