INHIBIDORES DE LA RECAPTACIÓN DE SEROTONINA

The need to pay attention to theoretical models of language performance as opposed to models of language knowledge has been raised strongly in recent years by McNamara (1995, 1996). Theories of performance are relevant because performance assessment has become so widespread in language testing since the rise of the communicative view of language in the 1970s. The need for theory development is urgent, McNamara maintains, because the abilities which enable a person to do well on a performance test are not solely language-related. To account for the meaning of the scores in a responsible way, performance test developers should be able to state which abilities apart from language knowledge their test rewards and be able to show empirically that this is the case. To do this, McNamara proposes that test developers need a theory which specifies what the ability to use a language entails.

The terminological and conceptual source that McNamara (1995, 1996) uses to raise the point about performance models is Hymes’s (1972) theory of communicative competence with its two theoretical components of language knowledge and ability for use. Hymes posits that both of these underlie any actual instance of language use. McNamara (1995, 1996)

reviews a number of recent theories of language using Hymes’s conceptual distinctions and pays particular attention to the way in which ability for use is portrayed in the existing models of language ability. He discusses Canale and Swain’s (1980) and Canale’s (1983) model of communicative competence and Bachman and Palmer’s CLA model at some length. He signals the interesting but underdeveloped and slightly contradictory notion of strategic competence in Canale and Swain’s work as a good start and discusses in detail Bachman and Palmer’s development of this and other work.

McNamara (1995, 1996) considers a working version of the CLA model which stems from a time before the publication of Bachman and Palmer’s 1996 book and indicates that he misses personal characteristics (1996:74, 86), which are in fact included in the published version of the CLA model. These are important, according to McNamara, because candidate performance in spoken tests in particular is likely to be influenced by factors such as the interactants’ sex, age, or race. He cites research which was beginning to appear on this issue. Furthermore, McNamara welcomes the inclusion in the CLA model of world knowledge, strategic competence, and particularly affective factors, which have not been included in previous models of communicative language ability although they obviously influence test performance. He makes the point, however, that affective factors should be considered more extensively than Bachman and Palmer’s point that as positive an affective atmosphere in the test as possible should be created (1996:74). The area is difficult, he acknowledges, and his proposal for ways forward is to investigate the interaction between candidates and interlocutors rather than merely concentrating on an individual candidate (1996:75). To help develop the research agenda, he suggests collaboration with related research areas such as communication studies and behavioural science (1996:84).

McNamara likens attention to performance models to the opening of a Pandora’s box, thus indicating the complexity and pervasiveness of the questions that performance models raise. However, his point is that if performance tests are used, the need for models of performance cannot be ignored (1996:85). He criticizes the ‘Proficiency Movement’, as exemplified for instance by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Oral Proficiency Interview (ACTFL OPI) (ACTFL 1986) or its Australian counterpart, the Australian Second Language Proficiency Rating (ASLPR) (Ingram 1984) for requiring actual instances of performance, the interview itself, while asking the raters to only assess knowledge of grammar and native-likeness of accent and refusing to deal

with ability for use. The threat, McNamara contends, is that if test developers define ‘ability for use’ out of existence, they deny the need to investigate construct validity at the same time. Thus, McNamara’s case is that construct description is a necessary step at the beginning of a construct validation exercise, and when the test is a performance test, the human abilities which are required when language is used in interaction are relevant to the test construct.

McNamara (1996:85-86) argues for the need to develop the existing beginnings of models of performance. According to him, a weakness in the current models is that they are individually centred and embody a rather static view of communication. He encourages testers to expand their view towards an activity-based view of language in social interaction. This is closely linked to the area of assessment that McNamara discusses in the book, which is performance testing, mostly the assessment of spoken interaction for occupational purposes. McNamara (1996:86) begins the construct-broadening work by presenting an interactive view of the assessment of speaking (see Figure 2), where the rating is the result of numerous interactions: the candidate and the interlocutor interact with each other and with the test task to produce a performance. Then, using a rating scale, a rater interacts with the performance to produce the score. Each of these interactions has to be accounted for to explain the score, and this cannot be done with reference to language knowledge alone. McNamara calls for a research agenda to investigate the influence of these interactions on test scores. Chapelle’s (1998) interactionalist perspective on test performance (see Figure 1) is a further step in this development. The area to which Chapelle (1998) applied her model was assessment of vocabulary. The more complex model of the testing event entailed in the assessment of oral interaction would complexify the interactions further, but some clarification through the use of Halliday and Hasan’s (1989) concepts of field, tenor and mode might prove fruitful in the future.

The fundamental problem that McNamara addresses with his study of existing models of performance is one of clear construct description (1996:87). The implication for language test developers is that if their test is a performance test, their construct descriptions ought to take performance and person-to-person and person-to-task interactions into account. How this is done and what it implies for the nature of the construct described is as yet unclear. However, when discussing some empirical approaches to construct description later in this chapter, I will present some attempts made by language testers to analyse interactions.