ABSTRACT
Exploration of fundamental testing issues over the first half of the 1990s resulted in questions that had to be resolved if a new TOEFL® was going to be developed. The papers written during that period had identified issues and perspectives on language proficiency, but in order to move forward with test design and validation, the challenge was to articulate a framework incorporating communicative competence to underlie score interpretation. This meant that, in addition to a theoretical perspective on language proficiency, a psychometric approach was needed to link scores to substantive meanings. This chapter describes how project members addressed this challenge in 1996 and 1997 by articulating a construct of communicative competence within the psychometric approach of proficiency scaling. At this stage, the interpretive argument outlined in the first chapter was just beginning to be sketched through the implicit assumptions of those who tackled this challenge. Even at this stage, however, the inferences in the emerging interpretive argument were based on assumptions that had implications for a test design framework and initial research, both of which are described in this chapter.
