As The Chronicle of Higher Education's special issue on Grading and Assessment (2024) notes, grades often fail to reflect learning and may actively hinder it—a concern sharpened by the rise of generative AI, mental health pressures on college campuses, and growing attention to equity in educational settings. Language acquisition requires risk-taking, communicative experimentation, and affective openness—conditions that high-stakes grading can systematically undermine.

The session is grounded in a rich and expanding body of scholarship. Theoretically, the papers draw on Affective Filter Hypothesis, the Interaction and Output Hypotheses, and sociocultural theories of learning, as well as humanistic pedagogy from Rogers and Freiberg, Freire's critique of the "banking model," and bell hooks's work on power and grading. They engage directly with the ungrading literature represented by Blum (2020), Stommel (2023), and Inoue (2022), while extending it into the specific terrain of language acquisition—an area where scholars have called for exactly this kind of critical examination. The session also builds on feedback research (Hattie and Timperley 2007; Lipnevich and Smith 2009; Ambrose et al. 2010) and peer assessment studies to situate ungrading within established frameworks of effective pedagogy.

The session will run as a standard MLA panel within a 75-minute format. Each presenter and the respondent will speak for approximately 13 minutes, with the presentations sequenced to move from theory to practice to student perspective, building an intellectual arc across the session. The final 15–20 minutes will be reserved for open, unstructured discussion with the audience, a format that intentionally enacts the values the panel advocates: dialogue over evaluation, conversation over performance.

Assessing for Acquisition: The Theoretical Alignment of Ungrading and Second Language Acquisition (Evgeny Dengub, USC) opens the session by establishing the theoretical case for ungrading within SLA. Drawing on the Affective Filter Hypothesis, research on foreign language enjoyment and anxiety, the Interaction and Output Hypotheses, and sociocultural learning theory, Dengub argues that conventional grade-based assessment contradicts the core mechanisms of language acquisition. The paper demonstrates that ungrading is not merely a more humane alternative but a more effective one because it creates the affective, interactional, and agency-centered conditions under which languages are actually learned.

Foregrounding Feedback: Supporting Language Learning Without the Interference of Grades (Lori Mesrobian, USC) examines the relationship between feedback and grades in language instruction. Drawing on research by Hattie and Timperley, Butler, Lipnevich and Smith, and others, Mesrobian argues that grades frequently undermine the very feedback they accompany, distracting students from actionable guidance and reducing self-efficacy. She presents practical models for centering dialogic, formative feedback in language classrooms, showing how feedback can function as the connective tissue of an ungraded course.

Collaborative Grading through Peer Assessment in Language Courses (Jun Lang, Pomona C) introduces the concept of "collaborative grading" as a practical translation of ungrading into L2 Chinese classroom contexts. Lang describes a model in which students participate in the evaluation of presentations through structured self- and peer assessment, generating their own grades in consultation with instructor feedback. The paper demonstrates how this approach reduces anxiety, increases student ownership, and addresses the particular fairness challenges that arise in classrooms with diverse proficiency levels and linguistic backgrounds.

As respondent, Irina Dubinina will synthesize the three papers' contribution and open the discussion with questions that sharpen the session's collective argument—helping the audience apprehend ungrading as integrated concept, moving from SLA theory through instructional practice to student experience. Her position as both a researcher grounded in SLA theory and a practitioner who has designed and integrated feedback-centered, proficiency-based instruction across decades of teaching makes her uniquely equipped to evaluate the panel's claims on their theoretical and applied merits.

The panel brings together scholars from different institutional contexts—a large research university (USC), a liberal arts college (Pomona C), and a private research university on the East Coast (Brandeis U)—representing a range of languages: Russian, Spanish, and Chinese. The papers themselves reflect methodological diversity. Together, they offer a genuinely multi-perspectival conversation rather than a single institutional or disciplinary viewpoint.