Communicative competence and adequacy of the official verification tests. An analysis on the DELE C2

Abstract

Our aim is to check whether the reading comprehension test of the DELE C2 does actually measure communicative  competence. Our starting point is that any student at university level in his/her mother tongue could be considered as a proficient user, so s/he must be able to pass a test oriented to measure reading competence. In order to check it, we conducted a case study on 176 Spanish students, to whom we have given the reading comprehension test of DELE C2. Our conclusion is that this exam is not suitable, as its level of difficulty is so high that even university native speakers cannot pass it.