This paper examines recent approaches to communicative language testing, and, in particular, the testing of English for specific purposes (ESP). The first three sections of the paper are concerned with validation procedures as a means of verifying the claims made for new tests. These three sections con trast two approaches to language testing research — that related to Oller's unitary competence hypothesis, and that connected to the development of the ELTS (Carroll, 1978). Although the focus is on the latter, discussion of the Oller hypothesis is offered because it often provides a revealing contrast in methodology. Finally, the fourth section of the paper examines problems deriving from scoring procedures associated with ESP tests.
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