Most readers will hesitate to choose any one of these as being the most appropriate. They might wish to know more about the age, social status or present activity of the stranger: was he walking along, doing some particular task or just hanging about? Flexible Positions data in pictorial form, or better still with the use of film or television pictures, 'building up' the situation pictorially and linguistically. But here again we are faced with diminishing returns. Ideally, we would wish to put the test subject directly into a 'real' situation, to see how he responded. But if we did this he would become 'part of the situation' and we should lose control over the whole testing pornpros procedure. How could we 'provoke' him into asking questions about the time, that is, elicit a response within the area which we wanted to test ? Basically, this approach would be'test by interview'. But if you have a large number of learners to test, it is quite clear that such a procedure is administratively ruled out, quite apart from the increasingly sub­jective and unreliable nature of the results. At this point we can enunciate a general rule : the more ambitious we are in testing the `communicative competence' of a learner, the more administratively costly, subjective and unreliable the results are.

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