The major purposes of this article are to briefly describe the rationale and history of development of the “proficiency-based” testing movement in the United States, its current status, and areas in which additional research and development work are recommended to enhance both the psychometric validity and practical value of this approach.

The primary problems in measuring speaking ability through an oral interview procedure are not those related to efficiency or reliability, but rather those associated with examining the validity of the interview ratings as measures of ability in speaking and of the uses that are made of such ratings. In order to examine all aspects of validity, the abilities measured must be clearly distinguished from the elicitation procedures, in both the design of the interview and in the interpretation of ratings.

Research from applied linguistics and language testing is consistent with the position that language proficiency consists of several distinct but related abilities. Research from language testing also indicates that the methods used to measure language ability have an important effect on test performance. Two frameworks—one of communicative language ability and the other of test method facets—are proposed as a basis for distinguishing abilities from elicitation procedures and for informing a program of empirical research and development.

The validity of the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) as it is currently designed and used cannot be adequately examined, much less demonstrated, because it confounds abilities with elicitation procedures in its design, and it provides only a single rating, which has no basis in either theory or research. As test developer, ACTFL has yet to fully discharge its responsibility for providing sufficient evidence of validity to support uses that are made of OPI ratings.

Within the proposed framework, oral tests consist of several different speech interactions, each of which encompasses a variety of contextual variables that affect its output. These interactions are performed as simulations in order to tap unmonitored language, which approximates the most stable discourse style, namely, the vernacular. The sample of speech interactions included on an oral test is randomly selected from specifications of those interactions most relevant to the specific context and purpose of the assessment. The language samples are then assessed with rating scales, whose criteria vary according to the intended use of the test results. The accuracy of the scores, the quality of the test as a whole, and the assumptions made about oral language are examined through the relevant types of reliability and validity as well as through extensive research.

In this article we argue against a definitional approach to oral proficiency and in favor of a principled approach based on sound theoretical considerations. We first identify four problematic frends in the oral proficiency movement as it is currently conceived: the tail wagging the dog, false authenticity, premature institutionalization, and the psychometric posture. Thereafter, we offer the rudiments of a principled theory of oral proficiency, based on the theory of higher forms of human cognitive activity developed by the Vygotskyan school of psycholinguistics. The theory compels us to bring into focus such factors as open systems, the individual speaker, functional systems, and intersubjectivity. From this perspective, we argue that if the construct of oral proficiency is to have any significance at all for language teaching and testing, researchers must come to understand what it means for real speakers (natives as well as nonnatives) to interact with other real speakers in the everyday world of human activity rather than in the world circumscribed by language tests.

In recent years, universities and secondary schools have increasingly used the ACTFL/ETS Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) to measure the ability of learners to communicate in a foreign language. This article discusses the OPI in relation to current models of communicative skills and argues that the OPI fails to measure important aspects of communicative ability. Two Situation Tests, one written and one oral, are proposed as alternative measures of communicative ability and are described in detail. The two tests as well as the OPI were administered to American university students who had spent a year abroad studying French. This article reports on the changes in the communicative skills of the students during the year after their return to the United States. Statistical comparisons between the OPI and the Situation Tests are presented showing that the OPI is primarily a measure of grammatical competence. The article concludes with the claim that Situation Tests can provide a more complete assessment of communicative ability than the OPI.

This article reports on a first attempt to develop and test run an observation procedure for assessing the syntactic and morphological development of adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) as evidenced in spontaneous speech production. The procedure is based on the profile analysis approach, which was first developed by Crystal, Fletcher, and Gorman (1976) for the assessment of impaired speech (English) and later adapted to the assessment of second language development (German) by Clahsen (1985). The theoretical basis of the procedure is the multidimensional model of second language acquisition (SLA) developed by Meisel, Clahsen, and Pienemann (1981) and extended to ESL acquisition by Pienemann and Johnston (1987a). According to the model, invariant developmental stages in the acquisition of certain syntactic and morphological elements in German and English can be predicted and explained in terms of hierarchically ordered speech processing constraints.

In order to assess the developmental stage of ESL learners, an observation form was drawn up, incorporating a selection of morphosyntactic features whose presence or absence in a taped sample of natural speech was monitored by assessors. The ratings made by the assessors were then compared to those assigned through a detailed linguistic analysis to test the feasibility of using a “shorthand” version of a profile analysis.

Analysis of the outcomes of the test run revealed significant correlations between the assessments and the linguistic analysis. But some variation was found in the assessors' ability to apply the assessment criteria, and the extent of agreement between the assessors' observations and the linguistic analysis was less than would be acceptable in the given theoretical framework. However, the source of these problems was identified through the first test run and suggestions were made for further refining the procedure to improve its accuracy.

This article discusses issues related to the testing of listening comprehension in the context of the 1986 ACTFL proficiency guidelines (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 1987). After a review of current research on listening comprehension and development of listening tests, four issues are singled out for more detailed consideration: the meaning of context in listening testing, the concept of criterion-referenced tests, the notion of specific purposes in testing, and the use of technology in listening tests. A number of research issues are also discussed.