How can test takers develop their strategic competence for different test formats?

2 Why is strategic competence important for test performance?

Strategic competence can help you improve your test performance by enabling you to deal with different types of questions, tasks, and situations. For example, if you face a multiple choice question that has unfamiliar options, you can use strategies such as eliminating the wrong answers, inferring the meaning from the context, or choosing the most general or logical option. If you have a cloze test that requires you to fill in the blanks with appropriate words, you can use strategies such as using clues from the surrounding text, applying grammatical rules, or selecting the most common or natural word. If you have an oral exam that involves a conversation or a presentation, you can use strategies such as planning, rehearsing, monitoring, repairing, or adapting your speech.

4 How can you apply your strategic competence to different test formats?

When taking a test, you may need to use different strategies depending on the format. For multiple choice questions, skimming, scanning, predicting, eliminating, inferring and guessing are all useful techniques. Cloze tests can be tackled by using context clues, applying grammatical rules, selecting common or natural words, or substituting synonyms or antonyms. Meanwhile, oral exams require strategies like planning, rehearsing, monitoring, repairing, adapting, clarifying, paraphrasing and asking for help.

5 What are some challenges and limitations of strategic competence?

Strategic competence can be beneficial for communicative competence and test performance, however, it also has some challenges and limitations. For example, some strategies may not be suitable for certain contexts or audiences, or require more time or cognitive resources than others. Additionally, strategies may conflict with other aspects of communicative competence such as grammar, sociolinguistics, or discourse coherence. Therefore, it is important to be mindful of the context and purpose of communication when choosing strategies, as well as to balance strategy use with available time and resources. Furthermore, strategies should be integrated with linguistic, pragmatic, and discourse skills to avoid compromising one for another.