6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 
Assessing productive and interactive skills 
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Regional and global languages such as English pose particular 
problems as so much interaction is between non-native speakers. 
Should American politeness conventions apply when an Iranian is 
negotiating with a Chinese and a Brazilian? If not, what politeness 
conventions would you expect the three negotiators to follow?
In what circumstances do you think it might be important to assess 
politeness?
Purposes for assessment
People learn languages for a wide variety of reasons and these reasons 
have implications for the kinds of writing and speaking they may need 
to do in a foreign language. As with assessing receptive skills, the 
designer must fi rst consider the purpose of the assessment. What is it 
that the users of the results need to know about the assessee’s abilities? 
In profi ciency assessment, a user might wish to know whether an 
assessee has the language skills necessary to write a technical report as 
an engineer, give an effective presentation on an academic topic as a 
teacher, or haggle over the price of a car as a consumer.
In formative classroom assessment, a teacher may wish to know 
what diffi culties learners have in articulating certain sounds, how well 
learners are able to follow the conventions of a standard business letter, 
or whether they can control the degree of formality of a piece of writing. 
Each purpose might require a different balance of knowledge, skills and 
abilities and so suggest a different kind of assessment task. In developing 
assessments for different purposes and for different populations of 
learners, it is essential to consider how the nature of the writing and 
speaking that learners do will affect the kinds of linguistic knowledge 
they will draw on and the cognitive processes they will engage.