Reconceptualising Fair Assessment in English-Medium Instruction: Content–Language Separation as a Validity Principle in Higher Education
Keywords:
English-medium instruction; fair assessment; content–language separation; higher education; Sustainable Development GoalsAbstract
This narrative review promotes fair assessment in English-medium instruction in higher education, in order to align with Sustainable Development Goals 4 and 10 and to ensure that grades reflect disciplinary learning rather than English fluency. This narrative review draws on searches of Scopus, Web of Science, and ERIC to access studies published from 2022 to 2025. It synthesizes evidence and highlights recurring trends in the way assessment design, scoring, and moderation can keep content and language on analytically separate strands across three assessment families: written products, oral or performance tasks, and tests or portfolios. Guided by validity and argument-based and socio-cognitive perspectives, the review traces how dense reading passages, speeded conditions, monolingual orientations, translanguaging constraints, and rater inconsistency can pull scores toward fluency or test-wiseness instead of disciplinary knowledge. Findings indicate that fairness improves when the construct is stated explicitly at design, and when content and language are separated in scoring, linguistic load is managed through readability and lexical coverage checks, and brief calibration and moderation routines stabilize judgment. These routines can be embedded in ordinary timetables, staffing, and resources, and support more valid, interpretable, and equitable decisions. Overall, explicit content–language separation, from task design through scoring and moderation, offers a scalable organizing principle for fair assessment in English-medium instruction, and the review sets out practical routines that programs and higher education institutions can enact with transparency.
https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.25.4.41
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