This paper discusses the assessment of German language learners in classes for beginners in a context gathering monolingual Portuguese speakers and bilingual speakers of Portuguese and Hunsrückisch, a German dialect derived from the contact of an immigration language and Portuguese. One of the challanges faced by the teachers of these heterogeneous classes is to assess learners’ classroom achievement once dialect speakers’ needs are considerably different from novice learners’. It is suggested that teachers make a compromise between the course objectives and the learners’ different proficiencies and needs to assess their language progress, incorporating and valuing students’ multicultural and experiential backgrounds.
