Communicative Language Testing
Communicative Language Testing
The advent of communicative language testing saw a growing preference for face-to-face interaction as the context in which the assessment of spoken language skills would occur. In communicative language testing, the target of test inferences is performance of a set of communicative tasks in various contexts of use.
The social context of the target language use situation is conceived from the perspective of the language user (i.e. defined in terms of its demands on the learner’s abilities). There is thus a feedback loop between context and ability: The target language use situation is conceptualised in terms of components of communicative language ability, which, in turn, is understood as the ability to handle the target language use situation. The situation or context is projected onto the learner as a demand for a relevant set of cognitive abilities; in turn, these cognitive abilities are read onto the context.
The assessment of communicative language testing is divided into two areas: (1) the assessment of face-to-face interaction, and (2) the assessment of pragmatics.
