TY - JOUR AU - AB - In recent years, universities and secondary schools have increasingly used the ACTFL/ETS Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) to measure the ability of learners to communicate in a foreign language. This article discusses the OPI in relation to current models of communicative skills and argues that the OPI fails to measure important aspects of communicative ability. Two Situation Tests, one written and one oral, are proposed as alternative measures of communicative ability and are described in detail. The two tests as well as the OPI were administered to American university students who had spent a year abroad studying French. This article reports on the changes in the communicative skills of the students during the year after their return to the United States. Statistical comparisons between the OPI and the Situation Tests are presented showing that the OPI is primarily a measure of grammatical competence. The article concludes with the claim that Situation Tests can provide a more complete assessment of communicative ability than the OPI. TI - The Use of Situation Tests as Measures of Communicative Ability JF - Studies in Second Language Acquisition DO - 10.1017/s0272263100007312 DA - 1988-06-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/crossref/the-use-of-situation-tests-as-measures-of-communicative-ability-J7aS70A50e SP - 197 EP - 216 VL - 10 IS - 2 DP - DeepDyve ER -