6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 Part 
II
Speaking tasks
Controlled tasks with a focus on knowledge of grammar, vocabulary 
and phonology are relevant to receptive, productive and interactive 
language use. Some tasks described in the tables on the website 
accompanying 
Chapter 5
for listening and reading might also be 
interpreted as assessments of enabling skills for speaking and writing. 
Gap fi ll, ordering, intrusion and read-aloud item types, for example, 
are sometimes interpreted as indicators of productive abilities. Partial 
dictation based on short dialogues or ‘conversational cloze’ has been 
found to be a good predictor of speaking abilities (Brown, 1983). 
Assessments of grammar and vocabulary tend to be reasonable 
predictors of more general profi ciency – hence their widespread use in 
placement tests (Green, 2012b). However, the value of these tasks is 
seen most clearly at the beginning stages of language learning where 
assessees often struggle to build simple sentences and may not be 
capable of producing meaningful responses to more open-ended tasks.
In assessments of more extended writing skills, key choices facing 
the designer include the types of writing that the assessee will be 
required to produce (report, email, notice, etc.) and their social 
purposes or rhetorical functions (to inform, evaluate, persuade, 
entertain, etc.). There are questions to be resolved about suitable 
topics and how much support to give to the writer in the form of 
information about the topic, language in the input that can be used in 
composing the response, and access to resources such as dictionaries 
or the internet. And there are issues around how much writing should 
be required: how much is needed for an adequate response that engages 
the processes that are of interest? How much can the assessees 
reasonably be expected to produce? How much would be suffi cient to 
refl ect writing in the target language use domain? Thought also needs 
to be given to the time that should be allowed for writing, planning, 
reviewing and revising. Similar considerations are important in 
assessments of extended (productive) speaking.