Implementation Of TBLA In College English Tests

Since 1990s, in the fields of foreign language teaching, a newteaching notion of"task-based language teaching"(TBLT) has beenbrought forward by foreign language researchers. This new teaching modeemphasizes communicative meaning as its focus, and meanwhile it paysattention to language form, thus advocated widely. Based on TBLT andalong with its development, task-based language assessment (TBLA) hasgot its fashion; it centers on task, and its purpose is to assess students'actual test task performance. By way of TBLA, students can sufficientlydemonstrate their language knowledge and ability; therefore, it attractsmuch attention of both language teaching and testing fields.Though the notion of TBLA has received wide acceptance in languagetesting domain, how to put TBLA into domestic testing practice, and howto define task difficulty are still problems under discussion. As Norris, etal. (1998: 39) pointed out, in order to assess students'language ability,"todescribe factors that influence task difficulty is thus to become the mostfundamental things to do."The thesis, based on discussion of TBLA and the relevant theoreticalachievements, focuses its research work on factors that influence taskdifficulty. The study, according to the framework proposed by Skehan(1998), analyzes the relationship of task performance and task difficulty in different types of reading test tasks.With a reading test and a survey study carried through, the presentstudy aims at finding out the relationship between students'taskperformance and their perception of task difficulty. The results of the studyshow that, firstly, there exists a high positive correlation between students'test performance in each task and the overall test performance; secondly,the hypothesized task difficulty set by the framework of Skehan (1998)does have influence on students'actual task performance; thirdly, students'self-perception of task difficulty can be used to predict their actual taskperformance as well.The research findings mentioned above can further promote theimplementation of TBLA in foreign language testing domain, and maythread light on reading test task design and task difficulty as well.Conclusions can be drawn from the thesis that, in order to put TBLA intoreading test practice, authenticity and diversity of reading test tasks are tobe realized; what's more, the framework of task difficulty is to be defined,so as to match its test task difficulty to testees'actual language ability, thusto reach the goal of scientific testing.