The term “evaluating written language” hides underlying polysemic concepts that this article aims at clarifying from the start. Therefore both the certifying and the formative evaluation of written production will be addressed. The former is doubly institutional: its aim is to give an orientation and a planification of learning writing skills, and also constitutes the basis of the final decision of success or failure. The latter, widely claimed but less widely applied, aims to improve the  learning of the skill during the learning, and is based on diagnostic concepts, and, in coherence with those, on the setting up of permanent actions allowing learners to progress in their learning. These aspects will be illustrated by concrete examples.

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.

School assessment is a systematic procedure which allows enhancing the value of acquired learning as well as giving it meaning.The first challenge is to distinguish between certification evaluation, which aims at probing success in learning, and formative evaluation. This latter is more oriented to improving the acquired learning in itself. This “assessment for learning” can take different forms, depending on the standpoints of the various teachers. A second challenge concerns grasping the evaluation objects: on the one side the knowledge and know-how, and on the other side, the competences needed for their mobilization in order to solve a complex situation.

This paper considers the role of language tests as instruments of policy and contemporary society and the issues for validity that this raises. It contrasts approaches which focus solely on the fairness of tests with a broader view of validity which addresses issues of justice in the uses of tests. It illustrates its argument with reference to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and tests used in workplace accreditation such as language tests for pilots and air traffic controllers and for health professionals.

Transversal competences define and target knowledge that every human being should develop in school in order to understand the complexity of situations in normal life and act intelligently. However, without anchoring them in concrete situations, the course of development of these competences and their assessment seem to stay rather vague. After defining the concept of competence and sketching the guidelines of competence assessment, the article illustrates the difficulty of influencing critical learning inherent in transversal competence and the necessity of evaluating it. The last part of the article makes suggestions for professionalisation of this activity.