This article starts from the curious observation that, in a world where complex trades become increasingly professionalized, assessments in schools come generally down to awarding marks. If done professionally, the evaluator should before all other things answer questions about the types of functions that the evaluation has to fulfill and the procedures to follow. More specifically, the article addresses two important aspects of professionalization : evaluation of language competencies and the reinforcement of the functions of orientation and regulation.

An international test item bank can help to meaningfully link language performance to European standards and compare foreign language levels of students from different countries. For this we must make sure that students from these countries who are equally good at a language skill have the same chance of giving a correct answer to each item in the item bank. In this article it is shown that items in such an item bank may show item bias. What factors cause these items to operate differently across the different countries is a very interesting and important issue in the area of cross-cultural foreign language testing.

An overview of FLE (French as a foreign language) student assessment in Russia reveals the following state of affairs. On the one hand, diplomas DELF-DALF (Diploma in French Language Studies - Diploma in Advanced French Language Studies) and TCF (Test of Knowledge of French) are not officially recognized in Russia. On the other hand, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation proposes two types of certification: the Unified State Examination and the All-Russian Olympiad. The tasks of the latter were conceived in a way to become the interlink between the French language curricula and performance assessment criteria used in Russia and those devised for French and European tests and examinations. In other words, the goal is to create mark schemes and assessment criteria which would correspond to those of DALF-DELF and would conform to the recommendations of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). The present article deals with the All-Russian Olympiad in French (the annual contest organized by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation) from the methodological point of view as inviting pedagogical reflection and experiment, the purpose being to introduce assessment procedures which would fit into the common assessment system already adopted in Europe.

Reading assessment should be completed with cognitive skills (memory and rapid automatized naming) and linguistic skills (particularly phonological domain) related to reading and learning to read. This review aims to present the importance of assessing in general and the two aspects of reading assessment in terms of screening and diagnosis. For screening and more precisely to detect children at-risk of failure in learning to read, tests of language development and phonological skills are presented. For a diagnosis in reading, we distinguish pencil-paper tests and computer-based tests. For a complete diagnosis, tests in written word recognition and in reading comprehension are presented with their limits. We conclude that assessment should be closely related to interventions as prevention or remediation.