ABSTRACT
It is an unfortunate truth that those who populate the world of foreign language education divide themselves into two camps, which rarely meet except on the verbal battlefield. They are the teachers and the testers. It is natural that individuals with different outlooks and interests should be drawn towards either the teaching or the testing field. Testing is important for almost all the stakeholders involved in the education process. Writers on testing sometimes divide test types into two broad categories, within which sub-categories are recognized. These broad categories are achievement and proficiency tests. In psychometric testing, the multiple-choice question has pride of place. The reaction against discrete-point testing can be related to the 'sociolinguistic revolution' that had its effect on language teaching. Communicative language teaching finds its parallel in communicative language testing. Harrison (1983: 100) provides an example of how some tests try to find out whether a learner can make responses which are appropriate to context.
