Abstract：Poverty is highly concentrated in the mountainous areas and border regions in China, where the communication barrier is widely seen as an important contributing factor in blocking the national campaign to eliminate poverty. While the role of language education in helping individuals out of poverty has drawn increasing attention from educators and language practitioners, the principles and methods of evaluation on language-driven poverty alleviation remain an area that has not yet been addressed by researchers. In this paper, we first give a brief introduction to the concept of language-driven poverty alleviation, with focus on two main issues: what to evaluate and how to evaluate the effectiveness of language-driven poverty alleviation. From the perspective of language function, we endeavor to argue that the effectiveness evaluation of language-driven poverty alleviation should attach importance to the aspects of language function, and foreground the economic returns and symbolic accomplishment of linguistic capital as a result of language status planning. The effectiveness evaluation should also adhere to the principles of combining structural evaluation with functional evaluation, objective with subjective evaluation, overall evaluation with special focus evaluation. All of these should be implemented in a form of multiple layered manner. This paper also puts forward the third-party evaluation, urban-rural regional integration evaluation and other evaluation methods.
