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Date Posted: 05:48:39 08/05/03 Tue
Author: GRASIELA IZAGA
Subject: TASK#14


TASK # 14
PROFA.: VERA MENEZES
ALUNA: GRASIELA IZAGA

Read the text below and say how we can test communicative competence.

Testing Communicative competence


The idea of communicative competence is always attached to know how to use language in a proper way, being able to listen, understand, process information and answer taking in account the pragmatics.
Communicative language tests are intended to be a measure of how the testees are able to use language in real life situations. In testing receptive skills, emphasis is placed on understanding the communicative intent of the speaker or writer rather than on picking out specific details.
Few tests are completely communicative; many tests have some element of communicativeness. So if we want to measure the communicative competence of the student we have to give him/her texts that include reading, writing, speaking and also are able to evaluate the student's capacity to organize and express the information he/she got in order to do the task. Because of that the "communicativeness" of a test might be seen as being on a continuum.
Few tests are completely communicative; many tests have some element of communicativeness. For example a test that puts the student in a face to face conversation is more communicative than one that the student has a listening and questions to answer speaking out loud.
"A communicative test of listening, then, would test not whether the testee could understand what is the meaning of a sentence but place that sentence in a context". If a learner is going to be tested over a communicative task ,it is necessary that he/she be prepared for that kind of test, that is, that the course material cover the sorts of tasks they are being asked to perform.
Tests intended to evaluate communicative language are judged, then, on the extent to which they simulate real life communicative situations rather than on how reliable the results are. So the learner is going to be evaluated on how he/she manages to communicate rather than how they made mistakes of semantics or sintaxys. If the test intention was communicative, it would probably not emphasize pronunciation, grammatical correctness, etc., except to the extent that these might interfere with communication.
There is necessarily a subjective element to the evaluation of communicative tests. Real life situations don't always have objectively right or wrong answers, and so band scales need to be developed to evaluate the results.
Communicative language tests are then those that make an effort to test language in a way that shows how language is used in real communication. It is, of course, not always possible to make language tests communicative, but it may often be possible to give them communicative elements.

Bibliography
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Kitao-Testing.html

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