Communicative Language Testing : Principles and Problems

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Since both teaching and testing are so closely interrelated, there should not be a mismatch between what is to be taught and what is to be tested. In the last two decades, 'communicative language teaching' has been a key word in the field of English language teaching. Along with the movement in language teaching, it has been an urgent need to develop communicative tests. The purpose of this paper is to consider the principles and problems entailed in the communicative approach to language testing. As communicative language teaching pays more attention to use as opposed to usage (Widdowson, 1978), so does the communicative approach to testing. It is, therefore, concerned primarily with how language is used in communication. It aims to incorporate tasks which approximate as closely as possible to those the students will face in real-life situations. It should be noted that those who are involved in writing communicative tests are more interested in what the candidate can do with the language rather than what knowledge of the language the candidate possesses. By incorporating into a test the characteristics observed in a real-life communication, we can make it more communicative in terms of both what to test and how to test. What to test is concerned with the goal of language teaching and testing. The goal of communicative testing, communicative competence, will be discussed in Canale's (1983) framework. How to test is concerned with testing methods, which put more emphasis on the task-based language use in real-life situations. Some suggestions to testing methods will make under Morrow's (1981) modified slogans.

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