Abstract
The quintessential quality of communicative success is the ability to effectively express, understand, dynamically co-construct, negotiate and repair variegated meanings in a wide range of language use contexts. It stands to reason then that meaning and meaning conveyance should play a central role in L2 assessment. Instead, since the 1980s, language testers have focused almost exclusively on functional proficiency (the conveyance of functional meaning – e.g., can-do statements), to the exclusion of the conveyance of propositional meanings or implied pragmatic meanings. While the ability to use language to get things done is important, excluding propositional content from the assessment process is like having language ability with nothing to say, and excluding pragmatic meanings guts the heart and soul out of communication.
In this chapter, I review how L2 testers have conceptualized “meaning” in models of L2 proficiency throughout the years. This logically leads to a discussion of the use of language to encode a range of meanings, deriving not only from an examinee’s topical knowledge but also from an understanding of the contextual factors in language use situations. Throughout the discussion, I also highlight how the expression and comprehension of meaning have been operationalized in L2 assessments. Finally, I argue that despite the complexities of defining and operationalizing meaning in assessments, testers need to seriously think about what meanings they want to test and what meanings they are already assessing implicitly.
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Notes
- 1.
See Donald Davidson’s essays for a fascinating discussion of truth and meaning.
- 2.
Surprisingly, the commitment to a syntactocentric approach to assessment, where only features of the language are assessed for accuracy, complexity, range, and fluency, has persisted in many assessments. As a result, the effective communication of propositions and the communicative meanings associated with these propositions are often ignored in the measurement process.
- 3.
Canale (1983) later recognized that the rules of discourse might better be separated from the sociocultural rules of language use. Thus, he broadened the original conceptualization of communicative competence to include grammatical, sociolinguistic, and discourse competence and the cognitive component of language use, strategic competence.
- 4.
For example, anaphoric reference to relate the pronoun, him, to a referent, boy, or the logical connector, then, to relate temporality between clauses.
- 5.
In Purpura (2004) the term contextual meanings was used. The term situational meaning is now preferred as it attempts to codify meaning extensions derivable only from the local speech event (i.e., you had to be there to get it).
- 6.
Purpura (2004) specified only sociocultural meanings; however, as L2 communication in global contexts often involves speakers from diverse languages and cultures, the ability to understand and express intercultural, cross-cultural, or transcultural meanings was considered a pragmatic resource for intercultural communication.
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Purpura, J.E. (2017). Assessing Meaning. In: Shohamy, E., Or, I., May, S. (eds) Language Testing and Assessment. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02261-1_1
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