Fries' definition of knowing a language rejects the layman's notion that the criterion is knowing a certain number of words. It involves, rather, knowing a set of items--sound segments, sentence patterns, lexical items--which must be made a matter of automatic habit. Various approaches to testing someone's use of a language have failed to take…

One solution to the problems of discrete-point testing are tests of reduced redundancy, that is, tests that introduce interference into the communication through actual introduction of noise or through deletion of text and that ask the learner to perform in spite of the noise. Three test types were originally developed to operationalize the…

The idea of reducing the redundancy of a verbal message in a statistical way is presented as a practiced technique of language testing. Considering the temporality of speech comprehension, and the necessarily sequential intake of information, these cues may include the serial order of elements and transitional probability. To give the background…