ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1537384
This article is part of the Research TopicMultilingual Assessment: Insights from Psycholinguistics and Educational ResearchView all 4 articles
Tackling the challenge of construct validity in assessing newly arrived learners' receptive skills: Investigations on a multilingual online-based diagnostic tool
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
- 2University of Münster, Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
- 3University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
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We present the theoretical rationale of and first research findings on a currently developed multilingual procedure for the assessment of receptive linguistic skills. "Allrad-M" is designed to improve test fairness and construct validity when assessing newly arrived learners' ability to create meaning in listening/reading. Allrad-M is an online-based, criterion-referenced diagnostic tool and allows emerging bilinguals to switch fluently between German, Ukrainian, Russian and English when comprehending texts and working on test items. The objective is to formatively assess the comprehension skills of newly arrived learners in Germany, irrespective of their proficiency in German as a second language. Our first exploratory investigations are based on the perspective of learners and teachers: An analysis of 10 screen recordings of the use of Allrad-M by learners shows that they make extensive use of the opportunity to use their entire linguistic repertoire to understand two texts and complete the test-items. Employing the languages German, Russian, Ukrainian and English is influenced by both context ("reception" vs. "assessment") as well as modality ("reading" vs. "listening"). Case analyses reveal individual usage strategies. An interview with a teacher who has tested the tool in practice confirms the idea that Allrad-M helps to identify the potential of newly arrived children that may remain unidentified in monolingual assessments. Desiderata concern future developments with regard to the implementation of further languages and the professionalization of teachers.
Keywords: newly arrived learners, Multilingualism, assessment, construct validity, Translanguaging
Received: 30 Nov 2024; Accepted: 28 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gantefort, Barberio, Busch and Goltsev. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Christoph Gantefort, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
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