Introduction The narrow scope of education in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has resulted in a distorted profile in terms of students’ performance in international exams such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). Many think that this low performance is the culmination of a lack of classroom environments, working conditions, and salaries of the different employees working in the educational field, and other factors that make teaching and testing a heavy job burden for teachers, as well as other stakeholders. In the MENA region, there is a disparity between the assessment policies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE) and those of North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia). Bilingual GCC countries, for example, have been taking the lead in trying to implement external benchmarks, ably supported by language teacher associations and the widespread presence of textbook publication houses that sometimes organize regular training sessions for teachers (Coombe, Davidson, Gebril, Boraie & Hidri, 2017; Davidson & Coombe, 2019). However, multilingual North African countries have been lagging because of the controversies on education and teachers’ language assessment literacy (LAL) and their perceptions of test design, uses, and interpretations of test scores with an unclear LAL that, in part, emanates from a linguistic conflict between Arabic, French, and English. The bilingual and multilingual nature of the MENA context indicates that the linguistic scene of the languages in conflict is adding a lot to a complex and intricate LAL, especially when teachers struggle with defining the bilingual and multilingual constructs of learning, teaching, and assessment or in being identified as using a given language. For instance, El-Kogali (2020) argues that In the 1980s, the movement of Algerian and Tunisian public education away from instruction in French and toward MSA resulted in greater inequality in education (elites pulled their children into private French-speaking schools) instead of the intended increase in classical Arabic skills. (p. 26) There are no empirical studies investigating the complex multilingual North Africa or bilingual GCC countries and teachers’ views of LAL. Tracing back the intricacy of LAL to check whether it is about a de facto linguistic complexity or rivalry between Arabic, French, and English remains controversial.