Communicative Testing in a Second Language

has paid increasing attention to the or message transmission aspect of language, as opposed to an earlier almost exclusive emphasis on grammatical forms and the ways in which they could be combined to form grammatical sentences. This shift in our understanding of what it is that native speakers of a language know and do has led to widespread rethinking about what the content and organization of second-language courses should be. More recently, attention has increasingly been given to how the ability of second-language speakers can be tested. Some excellent discussions of this question now exist in the literature.' This article is an attempt to synthesize for the informed reader some of the main principles as well as some of the unresolved issues which have emerged from these investigations of aspects of language, and to describe several promising approaches to developing communicative tests.