ABSTRACT
Examining the influence of language on the ways in which students interact with tests is critical to ensuring valid and fair testing for linguistically diverse student populations (Winter, Kopriva, Chen, & Emick, 2006). In multilingual assessment contexts, in which the same test is administered in different languages, examining differences in response processes across students who are given different language versions of the same test is particularly important in identifying potential threats to validity. Languages encode meaning differently, therefore, there is no avoiding error associated with test translation (Solano-Flores, Backhoff, & Contreras-Niño, 2009). As a consequence, construct equivalence and the equivalence of the cognitive demands of tasks across languages are major concerns in multilingual assessment contexts (Arffman, 2013; Hambleton, 2005; Sireci, 1997; van de Vijver & Hambleton, 1996).
