Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

particular purposes with particular people in particular
situations. In other words they are testing the basic driving
skill, as does the Ministry of Transport driving test, not
whether the driver can actually use the car to get from one
place to another quickly and safely and legally—as the
Institute of Advanced Motorists test does.
Testing communication
If ‘knowing a language’ is seen as the ability to communicate
in particular sorts of situation, then the assessment will be in
terms of setting up simulations of those situations and
evaluating how effective the communication is that takes
place. Situations are likely to have to be specified in terms of
the role and status of the participants. The degree of
formality of the interaction, the attitudes and purposes of the
participants, the setting or context and the medium of
transmission used—spoken or written language. The
productive-receptive dimension will also enter in since this is
often relevant to the roles of participants. A lecturer does all
the talking, his audience only listens; but a customer in a
dress shop is likely to be involved in extensive two-way
exchanges with the sales assistant. It is of course possible to
devise discrete items, objectively scored tests of
communicative ability, but it would seem in general that
global, subjectively marked tests are more likely to make it
possible to match the task on which the assessment is based
fairly closely with the actual performance required. The
‘situational composition’ used as a testing device is probably
the most familiar example of this, and has been part of the
Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate’s paper in English
Language for East Africa for many years. The sort of thing
that is used is exemplified by the following:

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Write a reply accepting the following formal invitation:
Mr and Mrs J.Brown
request the pleasure of the company of
Mr Alfred Andrews
at the wedding of their daughter
Sylvia
to
Mr Alan White
on Wednesday 6th April 1977 at 2.00 p.m.
in St Martin’s Church, Puddlepool, Wessex
and afterwards at the Mount Hotel, Puddlebridge, Wessex.
18 The Crescent
R.S.V.P.
Puddlepool
Wessex.
There are however a great many other possibilities and one
of the most interesting explorations of what these might be is
Keith Morrow’s Techniques of Evaluation for a Notional
Syllabus (RSA 1977—mimeo) from which the following
examples are taken.
Identification of context of situation. Oral—tape recorded
presentation written response. Group.
Listen carefully. You are about to hear an utterance in
English. It will be repeated twice. After you have heard the
utterance answer the questions below by writing the letter
of the correct reply in the appropriately numbered box on
your answer sheet. The utterance will be repeated twice
more after two minutes.
Person:
‘Excuse me, do you know where the nearest
post-office is, please?’
(i)
Where might somebody ask you that
question?
A. In your house
B. In your office
C. In the street.
D. In a restaurant.
(ii) What is the person asking you about?
A. The price of stamps.
B. The age of the post-office.

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C. The position of the post-office.
D. The size of the post-office.
etc.
Question
(i) here relates to the setting of the utterance
(ii) to the topic,
(iii) would relate to its function
(iv) to the speaker’s role.
(v) to the degree of formality of the utterance,
(vi) to the speaker’s status, and so on,
to cover as many different dimensions of the context of
situation as may be thought appropriate.
Asking questions. Mixed oral/written presentation/ and
response. Individual.
The examiner is provided with a table of information of
the following kind:
KINGS OF ENGLAND 
 
Came to
Name
the throne
Died
Age
Reigned
William I
1066
1087
60
21
William II
1087
1100
43
13
Henry I
1100
1135
67
35
Stephen
1135
1154
50
19
Candidates are supplied with an identical table with blanks
in certain spaces. The task is to complete the table by asking
the examiner for specific information. To ensure that the
examiner treated each question on its merits a number of
different tables would be needed with different blanks at
different places for different candidates. The candidates
would be assessed on a number of related criteria. First,
success. Does the candidate actually manage to fill in the
blanks correctly? Second time. How long does it take the
candidate to assess the situation and perform as required?
Third, productive skill. If he fails to ask any questions, or if
his question is unlikely to be understood by the average
native speaker of English: no marks. If the question is
comprehensible but unnatural: 1 mark. If the question is
appropriate, accurate and well expressed:

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Assessment and Examinations
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4 marks. Candidates may be scaled between the extremes
by using as principal criterion how far the candidate’s
faults interfere with his ability to cope with the situation.
Clearly test items of this kind can have an almost limitless
range of variation, what has here been exemplified as oral
presentation could be purely written, information which is
here exemplified as being presented in tabular form could
just as well be presented pictorially—sets of pictures of the
‘Spot the difference’ kind for example, and it is not unlikely
that a good deal of exciting experimentation in this field will
take place in the next few years.
In the last resort most formal assessment of English as a
foreign language nowadays is a combination of elements from
a wide range of all the different kinds of test discussed above,
probably reflecting some kind of consensus view that
language does involve code, system, skill and communication.