Abstract
Research efforts to operationalize task difficulty and gauge the extent and direction of its effect on oral performance has been the common denominator between the different models within the purview of task-based assessment (TBA). This area has benefited from an assessment triad conceived by Skehan (1998) wherein oral performance can be evaluated along three areas: Complexity, accuracy, and complexity (CAC). Despite the plethora of empirical findings triggered by TBA models, the methodological schema to standardize difficulty predictors and regulate task demands has remained almost unaltered for almost two decades, and so reached some conventionalism evident in the dependency cross-sectional format. As such, a number of related research projects were invariably committed to establishing an effect structure based on a well-studied range of task design features and/or task conditions. This effect equation seems to be deterministic and speculative in the absence of a real role for individual differences, since measuring task effect against hypothetical learners across assorted experimental contexts can but produce an impressionistic picture of task difficulty.
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Ben Maad, M.R. (2017). Learner Differences: A Trojan Horse Factor in Task-Based Oral Production Assessment. In: Hidri, S., Coombe, C. (eds) Evaluation in Foreign Language Education in the Middle East and North Africa. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43234-2_9
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