As individual states and communities work out curriculum and instructional expectations, high quality assessments of communication skills will continue to evolve. An active cycle of setting goals, developing instruction, teaching, testing, and assessing student and system success is the key to the process of renewal and improvement. All types of…

The current status of the teaching of oral and aural skills in university French language courses in Great Britain is examined. A review of survey results finds that French teaching at the university level remains much as it was 20 to 30 years ago despite increasing calls for change, and that more serious attempts at change are found in Scottish…

Proponents of the cognitive approach to language teaching list linguistic competence as the primary instructional objective and attribute considerable importance to listening comprehension. For the student, linguistic competence would be knowledge of grammatical components of the language and its vocabulary. Understanding oral messages is an…