ABSTRACT
From the perspective of a teacher in the late eighties it may seem that communicative approaches to language teaching have had more to say about the first of these problems than the second. Indeed in this chapter I want to concentrate on this first question, but from the point of view of a language tester, basing what I have to say about what ‘mistakes’ are from work in developing a series of communicative tests of English as a foreign language. I then want to suggest that in fact ‘mistakes’ are not what is really important in evaluating and developing language performance.
