Translingual approach in assessing academic writing for emerging multilingual writers in EMI higher education

• Standardized tests bring harmful, negative consequences for first-year multilingual writers. • Academic writing is not a set of independent linguistic competences. • Academic writing involves communities of practice including three agents, such as students, teachers, and tutors. • Our RWS framework proposes a holistic alternative to standardized testing for assessing multilingual academic writing. • We emphasize assessing students’ linguistic repertoire, including their context knowledge, skill development and language proficiency together. Drawing from the first author's teaching experience in a first-year disciplinary writing course and observations, this article develops a theory to address the limitations of standardized language tests in assessing multilingual writers’ skills. These tests emphasize formulaic tasks that do not align with the complexities of university writing activities, such as reflection, or argumentation. The first author's observation of 25 first-year writers engaging with institutional writing support services reveal that academic writing is a complex process, rarely captured by standardized tests. We propose the Reflective Writing Space (RWS) model, a paradigm-shifting framework that reconceptualizes writing assessment through three interconnected dimensions: content & context, skill development, and language use and proficiency. This model advocates for a more inclusive and interactive approach that actively engages students, tutors, and instructors in teaching writing. We conclude with practical recommendations for implementing the RWS framework to better support multilingual writers’ academic writing development.