of ill-defined communicative approaches, in particular in school-bound settings: the official directives lack precision, they do ..... 13 (Skokie, Ill.: National Textbook ...
1 COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE IN TERMS OF CONTENT VALIDITY IN PRODUCTIVE LANGUAGE TESTING Wilfried DECOO & Jozef COLPAERT Research Centre Didascalia University of Antwerp - Belgium in Monica Gardenghi & Mary O'Connell, eds., Prüfen, Testen, Bewerten im Modernen Fremdsprachenunterricht, Series Bayreuther Beiträge zur Glottodidaktik, Band 6 (Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 25-36.
Abstract Communicative approaches, if indiscriminately applied in usual school settings, often divorce competence from performance in training and testing. In spite of many scientific warnings, the trend is still being propagated through official guidelines. This article tackles some of the issues: the artificiality of situations, the complexity of normal communication, the weaknesses of elicitation techniques and the way learners can evade the actualisation of their progressive competence. Stricter test manipulation seems necessary in order to better ensure the objectivity and validity of communicative testing. Especially in an elementary or secondary school environment language testing must be adapted according to appropriate pedagogical norms which reconcile communicative requirements and the strictly defined, progressive lingual means of the students.
1. Introduction Despite its neutral title this article has a political ring to it. During the eighties and even the early nineties the official directives for language curricula of several European countries were heavily influenced by the communicative movement, which had its roots in the seventies, mainly in the anglosaxon world. The principles of that movement reached many policy makers with a decade’s backlog. They seemed unaware of the scientific warnings that had been posted in the mean time. Although we should recognise the fresh breeze and many positive aspects which the communicative movement brought into language learning, we must note that some policy makers indiscriminately copied the easy slogans of approaches developed for heterogeneous adult learners with immediate survival objectives, without considering the characteristics of language learning in school-bound curricula. The consequences of this carelessness still haunt teachers today when inspectors come to evaluate them: training and testing should be “communicative”, defined in vague terms as authentic, real-life, natural, etc. Teachers who still use discrete-point evaluation or who manipulate communication too much are reproved. Nevertheless, within the symbiotic reaction of the eighties, criticism has been harsh against the flaws of ill-defined communicative approaches, in particular in school-bound settings: the official directives lack precision, they do not give clear indications as to the organisation of the learning process, they do not take into account challenging classroom realities, they dissociate competence and lexicogrammatical progression, they do not allow to sufficiently differentiate between various levels, etc. (see for an overview of critics, Decoo 1989).
2 This article expands on only one aspect of the criticism, namely the relation between competence and performance in language testing, delineating a number of research issues and trying to put them into a global perspective. The main thread is to discuss the issues in function of their origin, namely the proficiency movement of the seventies, to confront them with the insights of the symbiotic endeavours of the eighties, and to point at implications and unresolved questions for the present time. We will start by giving our definition of the basic terms we use, in order to avoid misunderstandings.
2. Competence and performance 2.1. Competence as progressive potentiality Competence in a foreign language can be defined as the acquired capability to understand and produce a certain level of foreign language, defined by phonological, lexical grammatical and sociolinguistic constituents. It is the expression of a potentiality, of which the actualisation, in spoken or written form, constitutes the performance. In this we follow Chomsky’s traditional terminology, in which competence is the system, integrated by an individual, and formed by grammatical rules and their application to a lexicon, which enables him to understand sentences never heard and to generate an unlimited number of new sentences. The only nuance one could signal is that the strict Chomskyan meaning of competence applies to a culminating point of mother tongue acquisition. Competence in a foreign language, on the other hand, is to be defined, at its initial stage, on a non-creative level (e.g. the capability to repeat elementary sentences) and only gradually develops its potentiality to understand and generate sentences never before encountered. We are dealing here with a more dynamic concept of progressive potentiality. Competence is thus invisible. A major problem of the evaluation is to make it visible and measurable. And of necessity we must turn to the performance.
2.2. Performance as constrained actualisation of competence Performance is an actualisation of competence. It is the fact of understanding utterances, by listening or by reading, or to produce them, orally or in writing. This gives us the conventional partition in two forms of receptive performance, listening and reading, and two forms of productive performance, speaking and writing. At the most elementary level, that of the very first words learned in a foreign language, the performance is still the exact rendering of the competence and vice-versa. If a beginning learner of French only knows the sentence Je suis touriste, his performance will be limited to the comprehension and the production of that sentence, which is indeed the actualisation of his entire competence at that stage. But this perfect balance quickly changes. If next the learner masters the sentences Je m'appelle Jim and Tu t'appelles comment? his competence starts to broaden, for he could already understand and produce hundreds of sentences by the substitution of names known in the mother tongue: Je m'appelle Martin, je m'appelle Petra Moreno... Tu t'appelles Jack? Tu t'appelles Victor?... In terms of quantity, the performance will be inferior to this competence because the situations encountered, artificially or not, only allow the use of a fraction of all potential names.
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This breach between competence and performance is a complex thing. In the realm of productive competence, the performance actualises, proportionally speaking, always less than the potential of the competence. An advanced learner of French who could say Merci, je préfère ne pas accepter de cigarette, car j'essaie de moins fumer, will normally limit his performance to a simple Non, merci, when a cigarette is offered which he refuses for the reason indicated. This often enormous breach between competence and performance poses fundamental problems for the evaluation, especially of more creative language use. But also for the receptive competence the situation might be identical according to the level of the learner: we read and hear only a tiny fraction of what we could understand. On the other hand, especially in a foreign language, a fair number of utterances can exceed by far the capability of the learner to understand or to produce them. In that case, competence will be inferior to the lingual performance presented to the learner. Higgs and Clifford suggest in this respect an "output hypothesis", analogous to Krashen’s "input hypothesis": "When the communicative demands made upon the students are too far beyond their current competence, they are forced to adopt or invent communication strategies that lead to fossilisation and ultimately prove self-defeating. For this reason it is important to match the communicative task to the student's performance level" (Higgs & Clifford 1982 : 78). Valdman adds to this an equally important predicament: "When second language learners are forced to use grammatical features and to make semantic differentiations that are beyond their processing capabilities, they resort to structural reduction... It is the responsibility of syllabus designers, developers of teaching materials, and classroom instructors alike to avoid both types of mismatches between language use tasks and linguistic means available to learners. The notion of pedagogical norm... promises to lead to this mutual adjustment between language form and language use" (Valdman 1987 : 144-145). It allows us to understand even better the major problem of evaluation: how can the evaluation of a performance, which is measurable by a test, give an objective and valid rendering of the competence of the individual being tested? This problem is at the core of many discussions on the validity of language testing.
3. Critical considerations on the breach between competence and performance Since the early sixties one of the major concerns of language testing has been to create or recreate in tests the essence of “language as it really functions”. The terms to designate this feature abound in the literature since Carroll (1961) and Lado (1961): direct, natural, functional, communicative, integrative, authentic. It is obvious that we should agree in principle with this preoccupation. An indispensable objective for language learning is no doubt this “functional” or “authentic” language use. During the seventies the “proficiency movement” stressed this use even more, in particular in behalf of the oral proficiency, whereby the “normal lingual behaviour” of candidates is to be evaluated. We will not quote here the substantial literature of the period. However, an equally abundant number of scientific studies, especially since the early eighties, pointed at problems in the definition and the actualisation of this “normal lingual behaviour” within the framework of testing (Bachman & Palmer 1979; Bachman & Clark 1987; Canale 1984; Hughes 1981;
4 Klein-Braley 1985; Oller 1979a; 1979b; Spolsky 1981, and other studies cited in this article). In the following points, we will discuss a number of critical aspects dealing with this breach between competence and performance, with emphasis on the more difficult part of the evaluation, i.e. the more creative productive competence.
3.1 Situational artificiality in communicative testing Unless one is able to follow a candidate stealthily and steadily in daily situations in which he must use the foreign language, and to register and evaluate everything listened to, read, spoken and written, we must concede that a “natural” language test always remains an artificial endeavour (Weir 1981; Alderson 1981a, 1981b, 1983; Jones 1985; Klein-Braley 1985; Shohamy & Reves 1985; Stevenson 1985a; Bachman 1990). Indeed, almost all “natural” items used in language tests include elicitations which do not coincide with the reality of the situation. Examples: "Could you pass me the salt?", "Do you know from which platform the train for Manchester leaves?", "It’s almost midnight, I must leave ", etc. To understand and/or to react adequately the candidate has to imagine, straightaway and under the stress of the test, the situations which these elicitations might evoke. This obligation entails the application of a supplementary, essentially pragmatic competence, i.e. the capability to integrate oneself for a brief moment in an imagined situation. Younger students may also lack experience with the situation in question. Especially in the realm of foreign language, “realistic” items might include references to socio-cultural or adult realities with which the young learner has never had any personal experience (taking the underground in Paris, ordering a meal in a French restaurant, explaining a problem with your car…). In general the energy which the application of this supplementary competence demands from a number of candidates is underestimated. The validity of what one wants to test may be strongly undermined. Kwakernaak specifies it in these terms: “A great part of speech training bleeds to death because of tasks that are too open and require too much creativity, fantasy and erudition from the learners. It is great to see that the learners have these talents, but one should not make speech training, and even less the evaluation depend on them” (Kwakernaak 1993 : 399, translated from Dutch). In this respect Underhill has also drawn attention to the uneasiness or the aversion which certain students feel when they have to “play a role” that does not suit them or that they find ridiculous (Underhill 1987 : 52-53). Moreover, even if in a test with authentic items we must necessarily “pretend”, even if we consider the items as a “mirror” of reality, this reality is different, because it is part of a complex and concrete referential framework which constantly reinforces the communication. Expectations and redundancy play dominant roles here. When I take a taxi and I do not immediately say where I want to go, I expect the first question of the driver to be something of the kind “Where do you want to go?” At the same time, factors external to language repeat or confirm the information through other channels (redundancy): the way in which the driver turns himself somewhat towards me, the expression on his face, the gesture which indicates that he wants to move on … But the reality is still much more complex. Let us look at the example of Bachman (1990 : 88-91): imagine a context in which you, as a tired host, want a guest to leave because it is getting late. The
5 desired speech act is an order by which someone has to leave. But in our social culture, the actualisation of this act will never be done through direct utterances such as: - Leave! - I want you to leave. - I’d be happy if you would leave now. The actualisation of the speech act will be achieved through indirect communication strategies, according to the complex rules of etiquette and according to the circumstances. The host could possibly profit from a sentence concluding a topic of conversation or from an appropriate pause in the exchanges. The host would adopt an intonation that announces a sort of conclusion, without wanting to give the impression of chasing out the guest: - Well, we sure had a nice evening together. - Gee, it’s already midnight. - Time flies when we enjoy such good conversation. Tomorrow, back to work. But these sentences are still likely to be too direct. The host might also try to draw the guest’s attention to an element that might urge him to go home. There are numerous possibilities. To quote only a few: - Oh, it’s starting to rain. The road may become slippery. - Do you have a good baby-sitter? - What time do your children have to go to school in the morning? All real communication is therefore influenced by this considerable input of expectations, of redundancy and of indirect communication strategies inspired by the circumstances. Such input, however, is lacking in practically all the tests called “communicative”. This considerable gap explains the difficulty experienced by many learners when they have to imagine concrete elements and particular circumstances to enrich a conversation required in the emptiness of a sudden communicative test. This lack of inspiration, which has nothing to do with language competence, could strongly influence the score.
3.2. The variability of lingual behaviour and the breach between competence and performance As we saw in the preceding point, all authentic language production is extremely variable, complex, depending on external factors, unplanned and unpredictable. It is precisely the theory of speech acts, often quoted as the foundation of the communicative approaches and applied to formulate communicative objectives, which renders the variability of performances endless and uncontrollable (Fraser & Nolan 1981). Basal, in a communicative approach, is the capacity of the learner to express himself “adequately” in a given situation, orally or in writing. By definition, the learner has to be entirely free as regards the form and the length of the answer. Let us take as an example a French test with the following elicitations: During a party, you meet your good friend Marc. You thought he wouldn’t come. Express that you are happy that he came. Next ask Marc if…
6 According to his level, the learner might respond to the first elicitation (Express that you are happy that he came) with one of the following utterances: -
Ah, Marc, bonjour! (with a surprised intonation) Ah, mais c'est Marc! Marc! Formidable! Tu es là! Marc! Formidable! Tu es venu! Marc! Chouette! Tu as pu venir! Marc! Je suis content de te voir ici! Marc! Je suis content que tu sois là. Marc! Je suis enchanté que tu aies pu venir. Marc! Quelle surprise! Je ne pensais pas que tu viendrais! Ah, je me réjouis vraiment du fait que tu aies pu venir!
This list is far from exhaustive. Each response points to an increased mastery of the language: indicatif passé composé, verb plus infinitive, adjective plus infinitive, subjonctif présent, subjonctif passé, complex sentences, richer vocabulary. Nevertheless, a learner of a more advanced level than the elementary is not in the least obliged to appeal to his full potential knowledge. To actualise the communication ‘in a sufficient way”, he could perfectly limit himself to the elementary level of the first year of French: Ah, Marc, bonjour! Or Marc! Formidable! Tu es là! - which would, moreover, be the most natural way to communicate, even for a native speaker. Furthermore, the learner fully satisfies other criteria: the vocabulary is sufficient for the situation and the grammar is correct. If the pronunciation and the fluency are also adequate, which would easily be the case with simple and short utterances, even an advanced learner should obtain, for that item, a maximum score with an utterance he already mastered in the first year. From their viewpoint defenders of communicative approaches can find this perfectly justified. However, the limited answer Ah, Marc, bonjour is not aceptable if the objective was to provoke a more elaborated answer with the use of the “subjonctif passé”, recently learned, in the framework of a progression test, since the elicitation mentioned: Express that you are happy that he came. But, as demonstrated, the learner might evade that knowledge - often even deliberately as a negative compensating strategy in order to avoid the risk of making mistakes - and still react in an adequate and natural way. If, in the framework of progression tests, we find the learner’s solution acceptable because he succeeds in the conversation, we lose a great deal of the objectivity and the validity: • We can no longer compare the learners with each other (the learner who has answered in the most elementary way should not receive a lower score than the learner who would have used a structure with a “subjonctif passé”, because there was no obligation to use that tense). • The possible responses are very different, which makes it difficult to compare and classify them according to objective criteria. • We do not measure the progress of the learners according to the acquired new knowledge (here the competence to use the ”subjonctif passé”). Thus the problem is that these kinds of items,
7 given on a more advanced level, may not measure the real competence in terms of lexical and grammatical richness. We must conclude that a large part of tests conceived on the basis of speech acts or situations, which pretend to measure competence in a framework of language progression, do not meet the criteria required for progressive school tests. Of course, the example given (Express that you are happy that he came) allows the learner to easily evade what he should master in his competence. A more concrete and more aimed formulation of the item renders the evasion more difficult or even obliges the learner to use what the test wants to evaluate. For instance: Express with "je suis content que” that you are happy he could come. But the manipulation then becomes clearly grammatical or lexical, which, according to strict communicative guidelines or official policies, should not be allowed. It raises the interesting boundary issue between “knowledge” and “skill” testing, or, as Farhady puts it, the “disjunctive fallacy between discrete-point and integrative tests” (Farhady 1983). Especially for grammar evasion is almost always possible: one can communicate quite well ‘in a sufficient way’ with elementary knowledge, avoiding structures such as relative and possessive pronouns, “le subjonctif”, “la voix passive”, “l'accord oral du participe passé”, etc. This kind of evasion occurs naturally in the everyday exchanges between native speakers. If one wants to control the “natural” mastery of those more complex elements in a communicative context, one has to manipulate the items considerably. But according to some, this is not “communicative”. Even direct and frequent utterances in everyday communication can easily be evaded. “Knowing how to express that you want to buy a certain thing” could be rendered, in a cake shop, through the utterance “I would like that apple cake of 60 francs”. But saying “That!”, while pointing at the cake, is an entirely valid language performance. If this “That!” is pronounced gently, accompanied by a polite and kind nod of the head and a facial expression that excuses the fact of not knowing the name of the desired product, the performance will be socially acceptable. No doubt the example we have just quoted is extreme. But one could easily imagine how much of the “expected language” could be evaded by a minimal reaction to the following elicitations: - Vous avez acheté une paire de souliers, mais ils ne vous plaisent pas. Vous retournez le lendemain pour les échanger. Qu'est-ce que vous dites au vendeur? Comment réagit-il? - Dans la rue, devant vous, une vieille dame tombe. Vous l'aidez à se relever. Qu'est-ce que vous lui dites? Qu'est-ce qu'elle répond? Imaginez et jouez le dialogue. - Vous voulez réserver une place au théâtre, pour voir "La Belle et la Bête". Vous téléphonez à la réservation. Imaginez et jouez le dialogue. When we consider the possible reactions to each elicitation, this variability in the performance of “natural” language poses major problems for the construction of objective and valid tests, particularly in the framework of progression tests, in the way they have to be administered in a school context. As mentioned above, if indeed only the successful outcome of the communication is taken as a criterion, the learner has the right to produce utterances that are extremely simple, circumventing, as much as possible, all the lexical and morpho-syntactic stumbling blocks he feels instinctively.
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If we really want to measure the productive competence of the learner, in the framework of progression tests, and not only the performances that evade the lexical and grammatical knowledge required, a well-organised manipulation will be necessary to obtain answers that are sufficiently elaborated, convergent and measurable. But in that case it will no longer be a question of a natural behaviour in the narrow sense of the word (see also Olshtain & Blum-Kulka 1985; Shohamy & Reves 1985; Spolsky 1985).
3.3. The problem of sampling in terms of content validity Closely related to the preceding point, and partly superimposing it, a fundamental problem of the use of “natural” communicative situations in testing is sampling: to what extent is language, as it can be identified in the performances, representative, in a sufficient way, of the competence of the learner in terms of linguistic content? This question is at the core of content-validity. The trend of the seventies, as part of the ‘proficiency movement’, was indeed to consider the natural and authentic performance, evaluated on subjective scales, as some kind of barometer permitting to give a verdict on the competence. This approach has been characterised as the “real-life approach” (RL). Bachman, who criticises this approach mercilessly, defines it as follows: "The 'real-life' approach to defining authenticity essentially considers the extent to which test performance replicates some specified non-test language performance. This approach thus seeks to develop tests that mirror the 'reality'” (Bachman 1990 : 301). Taking into account the particular objectives and the often unique and detailed character of the tests of the “proficiency movement” (in general placement test or job interviews), it seems that we might consider this RL approach as more or less acceptable for that particular context. Nevertheless, the symbiotic reaction of the eighties was aimed strongly against the lack of representativeness of language in these kinds of tests. A number of researchers have denounced and still denounce, with tangible proofs, tests that simulate a “normal functional behaviour” (among others Upshur 1979, Stevenson 1985a, 1985b, Alderson 1981b, 1983, Skehan 1984, Bachman & Savignon 1986, Bachman 1990). The main argument of their criticism is the insufficiency of the content in order to be valid. To quote only Skehan: "This viewpoint [that communicative tests should mimic or simulate 'real' communicative events] confuses naturalness of setting with sufficiency. A large part of the problem in testing is in sampling a sufficiently wide range of language to be able to generalise to new situations. Merely making an interaction 'authentic' does not guarantee that the sampling of language involved will be sufficient, or the basis for wide-ranging and powerful predictions of language behaviour in other situations" (Skehan 1984 : 208). The problem is indeed that communicative situations, especially the most natural and the most authentic ones, may contain a lot of language elements, but not many elements that permit to really evaluate the developing competence. We notice this problem in “natural conversations” that learners have to prepare and play as a “proof” of their competence. These conversations, even if they are quite extended, are filled with easy platitudes. As already pointed out, learners evade, quite skilfully or unconsciously, the richer vocabulary and structures acquired during the most recent period of their language learning. To put it in terms we already know: learners with a high competence often limit themselves to a performance of an elementary level.
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In theory, students should undergo such test for hours, even whole days, in the hope that the evaluators can determine, step by step, incidentally, varied language elements which account more and more for all aspects of the mastered language, vertically (the richness of linguistic constituents) as well as horizontally (the variety of the theme’s dealt with). There is no time for this, not to speak of the difficulty to work with objective criteria (Spolsky 1985; Shohamy & Reves 1985; Clark 1979; Jones 1985). The practical solution to these different problems is clear: in order to produce a sampling of the language that is large enough, guaranteeing a well-balanced evaluation of the real potential of the learner, the test items have to be manipulated. This does not mean that the utterances would be less authentic - they should be able to occur in reality -, but they are selected and calculated in function of an optimal sampling. Furthermore, we have to acknowledge that the “teaching language” - the foreign language as a progressive entity for didactic purposes - has an authentic right to exist on its own merits: it is a simplified and manipulated language created to guarantee an easy integration and a calculated progression. This concept of “didactic authentic language”, launched by Alderson (1981a) still has not been, as far as we know, explored in depth by scientific research, but it is applied, everywhere in the world and since many centuries, in practically all the language manuals and courses. Quoting Alderson: “"The authenticity argument seems to assume that the domains of language teaching and language testing do not have their own set of specifications for language use which are distinct from the specifications of other domains. Thus 'What is this? - It's a pencil' is authentic teaching language, and so on. If one does not accept this, then authentic tasks are in principle impossible in a language testing situation, and communicative language testing is in principle impossible" (Alderson 1981a : 48).
3.4. Rectification of the criticism: yes to natural and authentic utterances If we have mentioned, in the previous points, critical considerations on “normal functional lingual behaviour” in tests, this does not mean that natural and authentic utterances have to be banned from tests, on the contrary. All the criticism refers to the modalities of use and of elicitation of those utterances in order to guarantee objective and valid testing, measuring the real language competence, and not fortuitous and limited performances. In order to rectify the weaker points of “RL” testing, we have to be careful with those modalities, of which we summarise the most outstanding aspect: the utterances in a test have to be, based on the obviousness of our daily experiences, utterances that are possible in a normal communication, but at the same time they have to be the measurable reflection of the progressive communicative competence of the learner. The application of these modalities represents an approach which, since 1990, has been given the name “IA” (interactional/ability approach), to stress the evaluation of the individual communicative competence as a mental activity which appeals to all the capacities of the candidate and all his knowledge. These capacities and this knowledge are defined in a structured way in a complex model of communicative competence (Bachman 1990 : 84-108).
4. Recommendations and conclusion
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Our “political” realm requires to formulate some recommendations. • In the proficiency movement of the seventies, the didactic contribution of phonological, lexical and grammatical constituents to the various levels of communicative competence was virtually neutralised, although that contribution cannot be disconnected from competence. Therefore, the dynamic relation between those constituents and communicative competence must be redefined with precision in order to warrant an objective and valid evaluation. “We have now accepted that communicative testing on a wholesale model is too impractical to be realistic and that all testing has to be some form of compromise” (Davies 1990 : 32; see also Canale 1984; Candlin 1986; Bachman 1990). • “Authentic language”, such as it appears “in reality” cannot be defined adequately on the basis of performance only. We need a theoretical framework which draws an inventory of all the characteristics of communicative competence and which tries to implement them, as well as possible, in the content of the test and in the circumstances of the testing. • Inspectors should allow teachers to continue to use fast and practicable tests, with objectively measurable responses, but which do have an obvious predictive value towards the global competence of the learner. • The requirements of traditional psychometrics with cumbersome analytic procedures, should not limit our creative search for new evaluation strategies. The application of such strategies should, however, be done with caution. • We cannot apply the testing principles for global competence, developed for adults, with all their problems of objectivity and validity already involved, to a school context where clear progression tests must prevail. In an elementary or secondary school language testing must be adapted according to appropriate pedagogical norms which reconcile communicative requirements and the strictly defined lingual means of the students. In spite of the magnitude of the symbiotic movement since 1980, the search for answers goes on. Even in 1990, Bachman was reiterating the basic call: “What is called for, I believe, is a ‘psychometric-communicative’ trend in language testing, that appropriately applies the tools of psychometrics and statistics to both the investigation of factors that affect performance on language tests and the development of reliable, valid, and useful tests of communicative language abilities” (Bachman 1990 : 299). We need to continue working towards that goal.
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13 The research for this study was carried out as part of the programme “Language pragmatics” of the Belgian Government (Interuniversitaire Attractiepool).
