What skills are most often assessed for placement purposes?

Given the focus on the communicative use of the language in the pedagogical literature, one would expect programs to be especially interested in assessing their students' communicative ability. Certainly, the wealth of assessment procedures used in the programs in general (cf. Table 5) would indicate that programs have, for the most part, moved beyond a single-minded focus on the raw materials of the language, grammar, vocabulary, and so forth, and have begun to explore the students' ability to use the language.

Despite this trend in the instructional component of the program, placement tests are still fairly restricted in terms of the types of skills assessed. Reading, grammar, and vocabulary were the three most often tested skills and although there were a good number of programs that assessed speaking as well, the number was only half that of the more traditional skills. The lack of speaking assessment can be explained to a large extent by the difficulty of assessing speaking in any type of large scale testing procedure. Some respondents indicated that although they would like to assess speaking, the constraints of the placement testing process effectively ruled out anything other than selected-response testing. In fact, many of the comments about the promise of on-line testing were specifically interested in the testing of oral proficiency. Though the lack of oral ability testing can be attributed to constraints rather than avoidance, it is a little harder to justify the widespread assessment of grammar for placement purposes in a communicative context.