Rethinking Assessment in Foreign Language Teaching: Fostering Semiotic Agency Through Multiliteracies Approaches

In this chapter, I argue for more flexible lenses on assessment than those suggested by proficiency or competence-based models, by proposing the notion of design (Kress in Literacy in the new media age. Routledge. 2003; Kress in Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to communication. 2010) as a theoretical lens for evaluating students’ textual productions, and by extension, for use in assessment schemes in foreign language teaching and learning. Through a purposive sample of textual productions and reflections of two learners in a multiliteracies-based intermediate French course, this chapter demonstrates the emergence of agency when students’ own interest and learning goals are accounted for, and proposes several pedagogical strategies for opening up space for learners to achieve their own goals through personally marked meaning-making.