The Measurement of Communicative Competence

In 1978 Merrill Swain and I had the opportunity to review theory and practice in the emerging communicative orientaitons to second language teaching and testing. The immediate outcomes of that review were published by the Ontario Ministry of Education in the form of a theoretical position paper (Canale and Swain 1979; see also Canale and Swain 1980) and a bank of sample items and techniques for measuring communication skills in French as a second language (Ontario Ministry of Education 1980). Although the limitations and problems in various communicative approaches have become increasingly evident since 1978, communicative competence has nonetheless become one of the most productive, influential, and complex paradigms in applied linguistics. Nowhere is this more true than in the relatively isolated area of measurement of communicative competence. It is thus appropriate to review activity in this area over the past decade.

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