A Tentative Study Of The Relationship Between Oral Task Types And Oral Performance

Based on the theories of oral language testing and Bachman's Communicative Language Competence Model, this paper tries to study the effects of different task types on students'oral performance. On the basis of the popular oral tests in use and spoken language teaching experience, this paper designs an experimental oral test, which includes three task types: situational reply, topic talk and free discussion. Through a contrastive analysis of the performances among the three tasks, together with the post-test questionnaires, this paper reaches some conclusions. It finds that situational reply has the highest discrimination power, and free discussion is more likely to help students fully display their language abilities, and to assess students in a more comprehensive way. Topic talk is least discriminating and elicits the worst performance. In addition, the three tasks show high agreement with each other and with the overall performance. In the end, the paper summarizes the impact of three task types on students'oral production, discusses some possible reasons, and also suggests further studies on oral language testing.