Unlike traditional objective testing methods, alternative assessments encourage student involvement in real-life problems and challenges. The teacher's role is to help students determine and identify assessment tasks and criteria, participate in ongoing assessment of work in progress, and propose alternative ways to meet criteria. This article…

Second language tests claiming to assess communicative competence are widespread, despite the vague nature of the construct. Sociolinguistic or intercultural competence is gradually gaining attention in the classroom, but testing has not kept pace, partly because of difficulty in defining the related skills. An opinion is that speech act theory…