ABSTRACT
The four elements represented in Figure 4.1 represent a broad (but by no means universal) consensus on the essential qualities that make up useful language assessment systems. I would not wish to downplay the importance of other qualities that have been proposed such as authenticity (Bachman and Palmer, 1996) or absence of bias (Kunnan, 2004), which are discussed in Chapter 7; but I would argue that they are reasonably well accounted for within this four-quality framework.
