Vormgeving Van Nieuwe Doelen Voor Gespreksvaardigheid in de Tweede Fase

Recently new objectives have been defined for foreign languages in Dutch upper secondary education. These objectives have served as a starting point for curriculum development at SLO (Dutch National Institute for Curriculum Develop-ment). Within the framework of a task-based syllabus as defined by Breen (1987) a communicative activities programme, mainly focussing on speaking, has been designed by SLO and tried out at several schools. Four criteria for grading and sequencing activities were used: level of control in activities, familiarity with theme, linguistic complexity, and complexity of classroom management.The development of tests on the basis of these new objectives will be a challenging task. Care must be taken that such tests are valid, i.e. that they contain a fair representation of the objectives. CITO (Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement) has called for a refinement of the criteria on which the assessment must be based.