ABSTRACT
Listening and reading performance is not directly visible to an observer. Evidence that learners have understood a text can only come when they carry out a related task, such as answering a series of questions about the content. The assessment of the receptive skills involves distinguishing between purposes for listening and reading, which may be associated with different kinds of text. More skilled listeners and readers will be more successful at fulfilling their purposes – such obtaining information they need from spoken or written input. Assessment designers create tasks that elicit evidence of how well language learners are able to do this. Inevitably, there are differences between listening or reading under test conditions and listening or reading for real-life purposes. The assessment designers therefore need to provide users evidence that the ways in which assessees listen to or read test material accurately matches or predicts the ways in which they do this in real-life. Suggestions are provided on how to design assessment tasks that reflect different listening and reading purposes and processes.
