Assessing speaking and communicative competence
Recently, the importance of communicative competence and the necessity of taking
this aspect of language proficiency into account while developing language tests have
been more frequently mentioned in the literature. Different scholars have tried to
define communicative competence and its place in language testing. Speaking ability,
because of its special features, compared to other language skills receives focused
attention in discussions related to communicative competence. Of course, this is
unsurprisingly expected because a great deal of what is meant by communication
happens through real time conversation among the speakers of English, and quite
naturally, when trying to measure one’s ability to use the language for communicative
purposes, the ability of speaking would enjoy focused attention and deliberation.