6 Assessing productive and interactive skills Personal refl ection

 
Assessing productive and interactive skills 
129
the participants some time to consider what they will say. It can also 
be argued that every text is, in some sense, a contribution to an ongoing 
social ‘conversation’ or interactive exchange of ideas.
The productive end of the continuum generally implies more formal 
written varieties of language, although the distinction does not map 
directly onto spoken and written forms. Instant (written) messaging 
has many of the features of conversation, while contributions to 
dialogues can be planned, rehearsed and even scripted – think of 
formal business or political meetings, legal proceedings, religious 
ceremonies. Assessment designers need to pay heed to the kinds of 
productive and interactive language use that are relevant to the 
decisions their assessments will inform.
The productive–interactive division parallels another between the 
kind of language that we use at home or with friends and the more 
formal, careful language we use for more ‘offi cial’ educational or 
professional purposes. Cummins (1979) labelled these as 
BICS
(Basic 
Interpersonal Communication Skills) and 
CALP
(Cognitive Academic 
Language Profi ciency). Most native speakers of a language are 
profi cient in BICS, but CALP is only achieved through education.
Bearing in mind the physical, linguistic and social context, the addresser 
mentally shapes and organises the message that he or she intends to 
convey. Organisation is important both at the level of the individual 
sentence or speech unit – giving grammatical shape to the emerging 
linguistic message – and at the level of the text or unfolding interaction. 
At the more local sentence or speech unit level, it may, for example, 
involve provisional decisions about which information is 
given
or already 
known to the addressee and which is unknown, or 
new
. New information 
will usually be given prominence – in English this might involve stressing 
the words that refer to new information and positioning them towards 
the end of a sentence. Given information that relates to knowledge shared 
by the addresser and the addressee is often omitted, especially in casual 
speech (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). 
Bygate (1987) distinguished between two general types of speech 
(although his distinction applies equally to writing): 
factually oriented
talk and 
evaluative
talk. Factual talk has the purpose of conveying 
information and covers a range of rhetorical functions, including 
description, narration, instruction and comparison: ‘
this is a book 
about a father and his three daughters
’. Evaluative talk is generally 
more demanding as it involves expressing a stance towards the content: 
‘
this is a very moving story because it touches on family relationships
’. 
It covers functions such as explanation, justifi cation and prediction. 
Brown and Yule (1983) suggest a somewhat different division between 
interactional
language which functions primarily to build and maintain 
social relationships (think of greetings and chatting with friends) and 
transactional
language which conveys information.

---

130