Bien que l'importance de la production orale par rapport aux autres aspects de la langue ne soit pas le propos de la conférence faite par Mike Nicholls, il n'est peut-être pas inutile de faire quelques remarques au sujet de ce qu'il a dit: The testing that we do most of the time is written testing, which is virtually irrelevant of what people normally do. 90% of our students, when they leave their institutions, will not use the language in its written form or very rarely. They will do almost no writing in English after they leave and they will not do a great deal of reading probably but they will have to listen a lot, if they are using the language at all. (...) Oral language is more important in everyday use than the written language, as it is with the native language.