A commentary on “Establishing a Life-Language Model of Proficiency: A New Challenge for Language Testers”

In their article published in the second volume of the Iranian Journal of Language Assessment, Professors Pishghadam and Zabihi make a praiseworthy attempt to stress the importance of uses of language tests in real life situations. They explain the “life-language model of proficiency” and its application to language assessment and pedagogy. Pishghadam and Zabihi’s examination of literature is fairly thorough, although several important theories which would be highly relevant are missing. In this commentary, we will focus primarily on the assessment and validation issues observed in the article, as other issues have been thoroughly discussed by other commentators in this volume. We will further show that the concerns raised by Pishghadam and Zabihi are partly reminiscent of the notions put forward by the Common European Framework of Reference and can partly be traced back to the 1980’s. As a final point, we will discuss the shortcomings of their framework and validity argument in light of the current language assessment literature (Fox, 2005; Fulcher & Davidson, 2009; Bachman & Palmer, 2010).