Discourse-oriented evaluation in ELT

Abstract

The methodology adopted in teaching and evaluating learning EFL seems to lack various strands of communication. Neither does it allow for that partnership between the two aspects of discourse analysis: the linguistic and the functional (illocutionary), nor does its scope for the development of students’ capacity of use seem tenable. What is more, it does not sufficiently allow them to attend to contextual elements associated with given types of discourse.A model is suggested for the introduction of an interactive component likely to enable students to attend actively to the learning input when being taught and evaluated. This, of course, follows an interactive discourse analysis-based model of teaching. It is argued that a doze of such an interactionaldiscourse ‘medicine’ will do students much better in the course of building up their discourse competence and hence their communicative competence.