6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

Defi ning productive and interactive language abilities
As Cutler (2005) observed, productive language processing in many 
respects mirrors receptive processing. In production, the speaker or 
writer begins with a message to be conveyed, and the process of 
production involves putting the message into an appropriate physical 

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 Part 
II
Figure 6.1 
A simplifi ed model of language production
Source: based on Levelt (1989) and Chenoweth and Hayes (2003)
form: speech or writing (or sign language – although that is beyond the 
scope of this book). The listener or reader, in contrast, begins with 
uncertainty about the message and must ‘unscramble’ the visual or 
auditory signal to build (or recover) the message (see 
Figure 6.1
). As 
with the receptive models of reading and listening, there is a good deal 
of shared ground between process models of speech and writing, so 
the following paragraphs will consider both together.
In these models, a speaker or writer (the addresser), like the reader 
or listener, has in mind certain goals for communication. These are 
usually conceived in terms of a message that he or she wishes to convey 
to one or more listeners or readers (the addressees). Drawing on a 
mental store of vocabulary and on knowledge of grammar and 
discourse, the addresser encodes the message – puts it into linguistic 
form (speech or writing) and transmits it to the addressee in the form 
of an auditory or visual signal. The addressee then recovers the message 
through the kinds of receptive processes described in 
Chapter 5
. The 
addresser needs to make decisions on how best to formulate the 
message to convey it to the intended addressee in a way that will realise 
his or her goals. This will involve utilising what the addresser knows 
about the topic, about the addressee, about the context in which the 
communication occurs, and about the types or genres of speech or 
writing that are suited to the context.
A distinction, not always refl ected in process models, can be made 
between production and more interactive language use (Council of 
Europe, 2001). Interaction implies the kind of spontaneous exchange 
found in conversation, while production implies planned and rehearsed 
monologues – lectures or presentations – or written texts such as 
reports, essays and manuals. Production and interaction are perhaps 
best regarded as the two extremes of a continuum: even the most 
spontaneous conversations include brief planning pauses and do allow 

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