Evaluating the Communicative Nature of High-Stakes English Language Tests in Ghana

Abstract

According to the official English Language syllabus issued by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) of the Ministry of Education, the aim of teaching English is to assist learners to communicate effectively in English and to improve their communicative competence so that they can communicate effectively and confidently with other users of English. To achieve this aim of teaching English, NaCCA advises teachers of English and test developers to adopt communicative language teaching and communicative language testing respectively in teaching and testing of English Language in Ghana. The objective of this paper was to find out whether the high-stakes English language tests in Ghana were communicative. The researcher used the mixed-methods approach and the convergent parallel design. The participants were made up of 24 English Language teachers and 344 students from 6 junior high schools and 6 senior high schools.  The findings revealed that the high-stakes tests were not communicative enough. For this reason, the teachers did not also teach the Language communicatively. This implies that proper or well-designed language tests can go a long way to improve the quality of classroom teaching and learning.