We can test the student’s communicative competence in a second language checking their improvement to use the target language to negotiate meaning as in a real situation. The communicative competence is much more related with being able to communicate meaningfully than being able to construct grammatically correct sentences; moreover, not every grammatically correct sentence is functionally acceptable or appropriate in some situations. Furthermore, when talking about communication we should consider that in real situation learners combine different skills to make theirselves meaningful.
How such skill could be tested, then. S. Katheleen in her article at http://iteslj.org/Articless/Kitao-Testing.html pointed out some strategies of testing communicative competence, and, it is said that productive and receptive skill should be combined on the test. Katheleen differs productive and receptive skills as “emphasis is placed on appropriateness rather than on ability to form grammatical, correct sentences” and “emphasis is placed on understanding the communicative intent of the speaker rather than on picking out specific details”.
Thus, we can conclude that when testing student’s communicative competence, we as teachers should make the testes based in situations where the students have a necessity of using the target language to communicate considering their level on the language. So, good examples of communicative test are ones that involve exchange of information by students to solve a problem such as role-plays and information gap. In these situations, teachers must be aware of student’s competence of giving and receiving information.
