Communicative Language Testing

      Communicative Language Testing

By the mid-1980s, the language-testing field had abandoned arguments about the unitary trait hypothesis and had begun to focus on designing communicative language-testing tasks. Bachman and Palmer (1996, p 9) include among “fundamental” principles of language testing the need for a correspondence between language test performance and language use: “In order for a particular language test to be useful for its intended purposes, test performance must correspond in demonstrable ways to language use in real life. As Weir (1990, p.6) noted, “Integrative tests such as cloze only tell us about a candidate’s linguistic competence. They do not tell us anything directly about a student’s performance ability.”

Following Canale and Swain’s (1980) model of communicative competence, Bachman (1990) proposed a model of language competence consisting of organizational and pragmatic competence, respectively subdivided into grammatical and textual components, and into illocutionary and sociolinguistic compenents. Bachman and Palmer (1996, pp. 70f) also emphasized the importance of strategic competence in the process of communication. All elements of the model, especially pragmatic and strategic abilities, needed to be included in the constructs of language testing and in the actual performance required of test-takers.

Communicative Language Tests are distinguished by two main features:

·         Communicative Language Tests are performance tests and therefore require assessment to be carried out when the learner or candidate in engaged in an extended (receptive/productive) act of communication

·         Communicative Language Tests pay attention to the social roles candidates would assume and hence considers the roles that candidates would assume in the real world on passing the test and offers a means of specifying the demands of such roles in detail

In 1980, Michael Canale and Merrill Swain published a paper that specified four components of communicative competence:

·         Grammatical competence: knowledge of systematic features of grammar, lexis and phonology

·         Sociolinguistic competence: knowledge of rules of language use in terms of what is appropriate in different contexts

·         Strategic competence: ability to compensate for incomplete or imperfect linguistic resources in a second language by using (other) successful communication strategies

·         Discourse competence: ability to deal with extended use of language in context (cohesion and coherence)