Test Difficulty in Speaking Tests
A. Background of study The difficulty of speaking tasks has only recently become a topic of investigation in language testing. This has been prompted by work on discourse variability in second language acquisition (SLA) research, new classificatory systems for describing tasks, and the advent of statistical techniques that enable the prediction of task difficulty. B. The supporting Theory 1. In second language acquisition (SLA) research the classification of tasks in order to better understand their impact upon language learning dates to the early 1980s (Crookes and Gass, 1993: 1–2). 2. The only language testing studies to find large significant differences between how learners perform on tasks are those where the tasks are maximally different (as in Bachman et al ., 1995; Fulcher, 1996b) and employ multiple rating scales. C. Approaches to task difficulty in second language acquisition The assumption underlying present SLA influenced appro