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Tests can motivate some students to study and maintain or improve their English abilities. Tests can also cause major anxiety, or result in a student being harshly penalized for a spelling mistake despite using a difficult grammatical point correctly. Testing has the EFL application of providing clear evidence of language acquisition or atrophy of students. Schools, students, and parents, might require tests to generate a formal and readily quantified evaluation of English language ability. I feel that tests can fairly evaluate speaking, writing, and reading comprehension. I feel that tests are not fair to evaluate speaking and overall communication ability. I speak Japanese with a high level of fluency but intermediate level of accuracy. When I have taken diagnostic exams to formally evaluate my Japanese ability, I end up in low level classes because my handwriting is poor. If my work is evaluated by a human, they see that I know what I am writing, even though it is messy. I live in Japan and can communicate effectively on most topics in Japanese. My speaking, listening, and communicative abilities are very good. I have found myself correcting Japanese grammar of, or translating for other Americans with very high JLPT (The main Japanese Language assessment test) scores. I am a perfect example of where testing has gaps in truly evaluating your linguistic ability. In my own experience as an EFL teacher so far, I have seen students with weak English, but good test-taking strategies score higher points than students who attempted to apply higher-level grammar than requires. The students attempting to manipulate English to learn, are penalized for going beyond the textbook examples and answers. I have also seen students with poor stress management, get overly nervous, panic, and fill in an exam with completely incorrect answers. While nearly impossible to quantify, I think perhaps the best way to evaluate language ability would be to set up a role-play where the student has a list of tasks to complete, in English, and in timed as they speak with a native-speaker. Extra points should be awarded for sounding natural or relaxed and use of grammar and vocabulary. That would be a highly-subjective form of assessment and probably have no clear and readily quantifiable value, but it would be closer to my own experience as a learner and speaker of a foreign language, and teacher of EFL outside of my home country.
