This article argues that theoretical understandings of multimodality have enormous potential for assessment purposes in secondary school contexts. Informed by the work of three researchers in three North American high schools, the article offers vignettes of the effective assessment of communicative competence in English classrooms that draws on multimodality and design epistemologies. Building on the work of Bearne (2009) and others, the article contributes to the burgeoning literature on new approaches to assessment in a digital and multimodal age by offering three different perspectives on new assessment frameworks with recommendations for a way forward. The article sets out to trouble the notion of assessing modes such as sound, space and visuals in a word-ruled discipline. (Contains 3 tables.)