6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

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6 Assessing 
productive 
and interactive skills
Personal refl ection
Think about a context in which people need to learn a language. This 
time you might think about a different context from the one you 
considered in 
Chapter 5 
(e.g., living in the country as a migrant, 
visiting as a tourist, steering a ship, working as a nurse, etc.).
What kinds of speaking and writing tasks will the learners often need 
to perform in this context? 
What kinds of written texts will they need to produce? Will they need 
to interact face to face or over the telephone with other people? Will 
they need to give prepared speeches or make announcements?
What kinds of knowledge, skill or ability do you think might be important 
in each case?
What tasks might you be able to use to assess each of these?
As with the receptive skills, obtaining the necessary evidence about 
speaking and writing will involve:
• defi ning the nature of the knowledge, skills or abilities that should 
be measured;
• identifying the kinds of tasks that assessees should be able to 
perform and the language abilities needed to perform these tasks in 
the real world;
• choosing and specifying ways of getting assessees to produce the kinds 
of language that will allow judgements to be made about their abilities.