Oral language testing at tay nguyen university  (Page 10/53)

To sum up, the two functions and length of spoken language production are deeply associated with what to be tested in a test of oral ability, and how to ensure success of spoken language production is primarily related to how to test or assess learners’ oral ability. The next section will discusses the suitable approach to making right inferences from learners’ oral test performance.

2.2 communicative approach to testing oral language ability

Testing the oral ability in a language is one of the most important aspects of language testing. This ability is an extremely difficult skill to assess as Heaton (1988) and Brown&Yule (1983) suppose. Partly because of the difficulty of treating speaking tests in the same way as other more conventional tests, testing of speaking skill has generally received little attention. In a genuine speaking test, real people meet face to face, and talk to each other. Hence, it is the people and what passes between them that are important whereas the test instrument is secondary. To put it more closely, oral tests should be designed around the people involved so that they can be encouraged to talk to each other as naturally as possible.

For several decades, a new theory of language and language use has exerted a considerable influence on language teaching and potentially on language testing. For example, Hymes’s theory of communicative competence is concerned with not only language forms but also the ability to use language in socio-cultural context. Communicative competence in oral language ‘requires control of a wide range of phonological and syntactic features, vocabulary, and oral genres and the knowledge of how to use them appropriately’ (Butler et al., 2000, p.2) Although the relevance of this theory to language testing was recognized more or less immediately, it took quite long for its actual impact on practice to be felt in the development of communicative language tests. McNamara (2000, p. 16-17) characterises communicative language tests to have two features:

1. they are performance tests, requiring assessment to be carried out when the learner or candidate is engaged in an extended act of communication;
2. they pay attention to the social roles candidates are likely to assume in the real world settings, and offer a means of specifying the demands of such roles in detail.

The communicative approach to spoken language testing involves assessment of how language is used in real communication. Accordingly, Heaton (1988) states that most communicative language tests aim to ‘incorporate tasks which approximate as closely as possible to those facing the students in real life’. Success in actual language performance is judged in terms of the effectiveness of the communication which takes place rather than formal linguistic accuracy. Consequently, the assessment of learners’ production of spoken language or test performance should relatively concentrate more on interaction efficacy than on accuracy of language forms.

In addition, the four following characteristics of communicative language tests mentioned by Brown and Gonzo (1995, p.421-422) include a broad basis for both the design and use of language tests.