Bloom's taxonomy for assessing language skills Content introduction main body

I could have left early but I stayed to see the end
is first remembering and understanding the verb before applying it for a communicative purpose.

One may be able to remember and understand a sentence such as:

The man told John that the house was for sale
and apply it for a communicative purpose to explain John's behaviour and that is a valuable ability. However, to extend that knowledge to making a sentence such as:
The old woman in the corner of the bar deliberately told Mary and her friends that the concert had been cancelled
requires an ability to analyse sentences in English into items such as Subject noun phrase, Verb phrase, Indirect object noun phrase and Direct object nominalised clause. Without the ability to analyse the constituents of language one remains at the level of remembering, understanding and being able to apply disconnected utterances without the option of producing parallel accurate language for other communicative purposes.
One may be able to remember, understand, apply and analyse a sentence such as
If you hadn't left so early, you wouldn't have missed the important part of the meeting
but, unless you can evaluate how such an utterance is intended and what implications for future behaviours the speaker has in mind, it is difficult to communicate effectively or enter a discussion about causes and effects.
It may, for example, be evaluated as simply a statement of fact with no overtones. On the other hand, it may be evaluated as a criticism of a failure to stay and a warning not to be so lax in future. Evaluation involves, therefore, an understanding of roles, intentions and power relationships and how they affect the application of language to a situation.⁶
This is the most demanding cognitive task because it requires people to deploy all the lower-level skills to make something new. In language teaching, this may involve the combination of language recall, understanding of words and structures, application of language patterns and communicative strategies, analysis of data and the evaluation of the quality and usefulness of the utterances of others. It often requires a synthesis of all those skills.
It is not something to be taken lightly or asked of people without providing a great deal of preparation. For example, in task-based learning programmes, learners may be asked to work in a group to present a complex proposal for the improvement of, say, their home town or place of study and, to do that, they will need to apply all five of the lower-level cognitive abilities simultaneously.