THE LIMITS OF ESP TESTS

Abstract

Global market forces have determined not only higher education institutions all over the world to include ESP courses in their curriculum to enhance their students’ future employability, but also public and private organisations to offer their employees the opportunity to attend ESP courses in order to meet the continuously growing ESP needs. From this perspective, ESP compentence could become a subcomponent of one of the key competences for lifelong learning, communication in foreign languages. Therefore assessing ESP competence seems to acquire paramount importance since stakeholders need accurate information about the ESP learners’ abilities to cope with specific language tasks. This article offers a concise overview of the principles and practices of ESP assessment, a detailed description of the features of ESP tests, while focusing particularly on the limits of ESP tests in order to identify possible solutions to overcome them.

Keywords

• English for Specific Purposes
• language assessment
• ESP assessment
• language test
• ESP test
• specific background knowledge
• language proficiency
• authenticity
• specificity
• tasks.