Communicative Competence in Oral Language Assessment

This paper reports on a review of the teaching and assessment of oral language in Western Australian secondary schools. Results show that teachers have considerable difficulty in incorporating oral language tasks into their pedagogy because of a curriculum biased towards developing writing skills. Teachers also revealed that they do not have the skills to assess oral language even though they acknowledge the importance of their students' communicative competence both within the school environment and outside it. Students involved in the study were also aware of many weaknesses in their communicative competence and that these were not being addressed in the classroom.