Grammar, the structural glue, the “code” of language, is arguably at the heart of language use, whether this involves speaking, listening, reading or writing. Grammar has also been central to language teaching and assessment historically, from the Middle Ages, when “rhetoric” was a key component of a university education, to the “skills-and-components” models of the 1960s that informed both language pedagogy and language testing.

However, although the way grammar is currently viewed, both in theoretical and applied linguistics, and in language learning and language teaching, is vastly different from the perspective that informed grammar tests in the 1960s, very little has changed since then in the way language testers conceive of grammar and in the way it is assessed in practice. Thus, many of the grammar tests that are currently in use, both in largescale and in classroom assessment, reflect the perspectives of structural linguistics and discrete-point measurement. This book takes a completely new look at the assessment of grammar, placing it in the context of current views of linguistic pragmatics and functional grammar. It thus brings the assessment of grammar into sync with current thinking and practice in applied linguistics and language pedagogy.

The author of this book, Jim Purpura, has extensive experience not only in teaching and assessing grammar, but in training language teachers in grammar and assessment. In this book, he presents a new theoretical approach to defining grammatical ability that provides a basis for designing, developing and using assessments of grammar for a wide range of uses.