ABSTRACT
There are many reasons for assessing someone’s knowledge, skills or ability to use a language, or languages. It may be important to predict how well a person will be able to use a language in some future situation: in a job for example. It may be important to discover how well language learners are able to use what they have been taught: usually at the end of a period of study. Teachers and learners benefit from monitoring how successfully they are picking up new concepts as a course progresses. Different purposes are served by different approaches to assessment that are discussed in more detail later in the book. An assessment that is very useful for one purpose may prove to be useless for another.
