Testing students’ communicative language competence in the department of English, university of Batna

الملخص EN

The following paper is an attempt to shed light on some practices in the department of English related to testing students’ communicative competence and how teachers concentrate on testing listening at the expense of speaking.

we found out that teachers rarely use interviews or turn-taking or classroom discussion as testing techniques and they often impose the topics for the classroom discussion which usually have bad consequences on the students’ motivation to speak and be involved in classroom talk.

the result is bad achievement from the part of students who develop negative attitudes towards communicating using the foreign language and being tested for their performances.