A Comparative Study Of Different Task Designs And Their Impacts On Test-takers’ Performances In Task-based Oral Tests

Since the foreign researchers put forward the task-based language teaching(TBLT) as a new teaching mode in the1990s, the focus of language teaching has beenshifted into the communicative meaning and pragmatic function of language.Meanwhile, the concept of language testing began to change correspondingly.During the past decades, many researchers have committed themselves to applythe task-based oral teaching model in the real testing process. As task-based languagetesting occurs at the start stage and the operation process is quite complicated, most ofthe linguists just make a simple comparison among different tasks and analyze theinfluence of task types on testees from the perspective of language forms. However,few researches study how different task types affect the testees’ language performanceby using empirical studies, let alone researches which aim to explore the test designthrough comparative analysis among different tasks.For this situation above，combining with the task design principles proposed byNunan in1999and taking Prabhu’s classification of task types as the theoretical basis,this study takes independent design on three kinds of different task types in themacro background of task-based language testing, i.e. information-gap task,opinion-gap task, and reasoning-gap task. Furthermore, when the experimental resultsare analyzed, the author adopts the Likert typical scale and the fundamentals of SPSSsoftware as the theoretical foundation to guarantee the scientificalness of the study.Besides, the perceptive information from the students about the different effects bydifferent task types in the task completion process is received and analyzed, aiming toexplore which kind of test can measure the student’s ability of using language verywell.Combining the quantitative analysis with the qualitative analysis, the author doesan empirical study on60sophomores, who are non-English major students from theUniversity of Electronic Science and Technology of China. In the study, their related performances in the oral tests are examined and their perceptive information about thewhole task completion process is investigated by using a questionnaire.The results demonstrate that different types of tasks do affect the student’sperformance in the oral test. Moreover, it can be implicated from the research thatwhen designing oral tasks, the testers are required to consider such aspects as whichtopic might appeal to the students, whether the language context conforms to theirliving and learning environment in daily life, and whether the given topic is familiarto the students, etc. Besides, suitable and even some curious testing modes instead ofmonotonous traditional ways are necessary so that student’s application of theircomprehensive language ability can be motivated better.The research results are conducive to the application and development oftask-based oral tests to some extent. Simultaneously, it can also shed light on the oraltask design and language teaching method.