Authenticity in Language Assessment: Challenges and Opportunities

Authentic assessment enhances learners' capacity to communicate proficiently in real-world contexts. It enhances relevance and student motivation by offering tasks that reflect real-world contexts and promoting students’ higher-order thinking skills, creativity, strategic collaboration, as well as effective communication skills, as they are required to comprehend real-world problems faced contextually. As such, it is widely recognized as a more effective approach to assessing students’ competence. However, despite its opportunities, authentic assessment has some constraints, such as time constraints, limited resources, and issues of objectivity. This article is a conceptual paper that derives its data from previous studies and is predominantly based on theories concerning language assessment. In this respect, the aim is to help teachers design and implement more effective and contextualized assessments within the learning process. Despite existing practical constraints, the practice of authentic assessment has the potential to improve the effectiveness of learning and more adequately equip students for real-world communication.