Measuring Communicative Language Ability In The Testing Of Listening

With the development of linguistic research, our understandings about language become more and more profound. On the base of several other linguists'research, Bachman put forward the concept of"communicative language ability". This concept points out the use of language is a dynamic process, in which language competence, strategic competence and psychophysiological mechanisms interact with each other and function simultaneously. These researches bring great influence on language testing, for the purpose of language testing is to test people's ability to use language. How to test communicative language ability is now a big problem to solve for the test designers. Communicative language testing accordingly came into being. Communicative tests measure people's real communicative competence by using or simulating authentic materials and authentic tasks that people face in their real life.This paper centers on measuring communicative language ability in listening tests. Listening is an active skill that involves many processes. While listening, the listener must use not only the linguistic cues but also his nonlinguistic knowledge to discriminate, to relate, to choose, to interpret, to process, to reproduce and to summarize, etc. An awareness of the characteristics of spoken language is also important in the understanding of listening comprehension as well as in the testing of listening skills. After the introduction to the listening construct theory, the paper focuses on the main topic, how to measure communicative language ability in listening tests. The research is done from two aspects: the choice of testing materials and the design of listening tasks. To measure people's communicative language ability in the testing of listening, the materials should first be authentic. And besides, the test designer should also consider the materials'genres, length, difficulty, and appropriateness for the testees, etc. As to the listening tasks, the most important point is also that the tasks should be as true as possible. They should be like those that people face in their real life. Based on the analysis of advantages and disadvantages, the paper makes a list of the tasks that can be used to measure communicative language ability and explains through examples and theories how to design these tasks and how to avoid the problems attached to the tasks.In the end, the paper attempts to prove the research result by conducting an experiment, in which the same group of students are tested with two different kinds of listening tests, one is a conventional test, the other is a test designed according to the outcome of the research carried out in this paper. Through the comparative analysis of students'different performance in these two tests and their responses to a questionnaire, the paper is to prove that what the paper presents concerning the choice of testing materials and the design of listening tasks can be applied to measuring communicative language ability.