Bachman’s Framework of Task Characteristics

Framework of Task Characteristics
• The characteristics of a language task are described by Bachman and Palmer in following five aspects: • Setting • Characteristics of setting comprise “the physical circumstances under which either language use or testing take place”. It includes “physical setting” (e.g. location, noise level, seating conditions, degree of familiarity of the materials and equipment to individuals), “participants” (i.e. the people involved in the task) and “time of task”.
Bachman’s Framework of Task Characteristics
Definition of language task
• Language task is defined by different applied linguists and psychologists in different ways. The psychologist J. B. Carroll (1993) defines it as “any activity in which a person engages, given an appropriate setting, in order to achieve a specifiable class of objectives”. • According to Bachman and Palmer, a language use task is “an activity that involves individuals in using language for the purpose of achieving a particular goal... in a particular situation” (Bachman and Palmer, 1999:43). It has three characteristics: a) situated in specific situation”, b) goal-oriented and, c) involving the active participation of language users.
Relationship between input and response
• Relationship between input and response describes how the input and the response are related to each other in terms of the reactivity, • scope and • directness of the relationship.
Input
• • • • • • • • Input consists of the materials contained in a task, which the individual are expected to “process” and “respond to”. The format of input includes channel (aural, visual or both), form (language, non-language, or both), length(single words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or extended discourse), type of input, degree of speededness, and vehicle of delivery (live, reproduced via audio or videotape, or both). The language of input refers to the nature of the language of the input, including its grammatical characteristics (i.e. vocabulary, morphology, syntax, phonology, and graphology), textual characteristics (including cohesion, rhetorical/conversational organization), functional characteristics, sociolinguistic characteristics (dialect/variety, register, naturalness, cultural references, and figurative language), and topical characteristics (personal, cultural, academic, or technical).
• Expected response • In a language test, expected response includes the language use or physical response the test attempts to elicit by the instruction, the task, and the input provided. The format of expected response refers to the way in which the response is produced. Like input format, it can be described in terms of channel, form, language, length, type and degree of speededness (i.e. the amount of time given for the planning and execution of a response). The only difference lies in the type of response.
• it is impossible to list all the possible tasks in the description of the target language use domain. However, it is possible to identify the distinguishing characteristics of them and to use these characteristics to describe a language use domain. With a framework of task characteristics, target language use tasks and language test tasks can be described and compared to assess their degree of correspondence. Such a correspondence indicates the degree of the usefulness of a language test task.
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• Reactivity is defined as “the extent to which the input or the response directly affects subsequent input and responses” (ibid). Test tasks can be reciprocal tasks, non-reciprocal tasks, or adaptive tasks. • Scope of relationship means the amount or range of input that must be processed in order for the test taker or language user to respond as expected. The scope can be divided into broad and narrow ones. • Directness of Relationship refers to the degree to which the expected response can be based primarily on information in the input, or whether the test taker or language user must also rely on information in the context or in his own topical knowledge. It thus can be direct or indirect.
Purpose of a task characteristic framework
• The purpose of language test tasks is to make inferences about test taker’s language ability that generalize to the specific domains in which the test takers are likely to use the language. This domain of generalization is called the “target language use domain”. It is “a set of specific language use tasks that the test taker is likely to encounter outside the test”.
• Expected response can be classified into three types: the selected response, • the limited production response • and the extended production response. • The selected response requires test takers to select one response from among two or more alternatives provided, and the limited production response consists of a single word or phrase, or even a single sentence or utterance. The extended production response, however, demands the reader to produce an answer longer than a single sentence or utterance. The latter two types are jointly viewed as the “constructed type” by Bachman
• Test rubrics • Test rubrics mean those characteristics of the test that “provide the structure for particular test tasks and that indicate how test takers are to proceed in accomplishing the tasks”. It includes the structure of the test (e.g. number, salience sequence, relative importance of parts/tasks), instructions, time allotment (i.e. the duration of the test as a whole and of the individual parts/tasks), and scoring method (including criteria for correctness, procedures for scoring the response, and explicitness of criteria and procedure).