Theory and data in spoken language assessment

Spoken language performance depends on both psycholinguistic processing in the individual and on communicative uses of language in dialogue or discussion. A social-communication view of language emphasizes that the spoken form of a language is used in social settings to accomplish explicit or implicit tasks of many sorts. In testing, the communicative tradition is associated with oral proficiency interviews. A psycholinguistic view of spoken language emphasizes that the development of component skills forms the basis of real-time performance in a first or a second language. The paper reviews the development and validation of psycholinguistic testing task types (e.g. elicited imitation) that measure performance in spoken language based on empirical models of processes internal to the individual speaker-listener. The design, development, and validation of these task types are presented. Data from a recent set of experiments indicates that the two theoretical approaches to testing do not produce different patterns of proficiency scores for populations of second language speakers. The distributions of paired test scores over several populations and methods are closely aligned and contain no outliers. This pattern of data obviates the need to posit a “communicative” basis for language test design.