Abstract
Development of communicative competence was situated as a basic principle of foreign language education in the Course of Study which was announced in 1989. In entrance examination English questions for high schools are expected to have suitability as means to evaluate students' communicative competence. Three levels in this research are set up to classify the questions: Level 1 (requires only linguistic competence), Level 2 (requires both linguistic and discourse competence), Level 3 (requires linguistic, discourse and sociolinguistic competence). Entrance examination questions for public high schools in 1992 and 1995 were classified into these levels and the totals were compared with each other. From the results two general tendencies become very clear: (1) the mainstream of the questions shifts from Level 1 to Level 2, (2) suitability of the questions as means to evaluate communicative competence progresses.
