task-based assessment

This study was an investigation of the washback impacts of task-based assessment on Iranian EFL learners’ vocabulary learning and grammatical ability at the intermediate level. For this purpose, 184 male and female students who were in their third year of school were chosen from 12 schools of (X) (X). This election was done via a multistage cluster random sampling technique using the Cambridge Placement Test (2010). All of the sessions were divided into two parts, 20 minutes were considered for teaching grammar and 20 minutes were for teaching vocabulary. The components of this study were Oxford Practice Grammar Intermediate Diagnostic Test and a standard vocabulary test extracted from TOEFL exams between 2017-2020. The researchers prepared a test for every two groups at the end of every three sessions. It was found that by removing the pre-test factor, the covariance, the task-based evaluation’s washback impact makes the grammatical and vocabulary learning of students better. Considering the reality that every academic endeavor contains planned testing and evaluation techniques to maximize academic achievement and progress, the findings hint that TBLA as an academic measurement device can nicely replace the traditional evaluation techniques.

Task-based language assessment (TBLA) is a framework for language testing that takes the task as the fundamental unit for assessment and testing. This study was designed to investigate the impact of TBLA on Iranian Male and Female EFL learners’ idiomatic knowledge. To fulfill the objective, 40 learners ranging from 18 to 25 in age and studying at Bayan English Institute in Rasht, Iran, were selected from among 100 participants based on their performance on quick placement test (QPT). The study employed a true-experimental design in which the participants were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and two control groups. First, a pretest of idioms was administered. Then, the experimental groups received a sixteen-session treatment that was the treatment of Task-Based Assessment. Meanwhile, the control groups received a sixteen-session placebo. A posttest of idioms was then administered to all the participants. The use of UNIANOVA revealed that the experimental groups outperformed the control groups in learning idioms. Based on the findings of the present study, all stakeholders, particularly material developers and teachers are proposed to include idioms in language teaching so that remarkable opportunities for improving idiomatic knowledge among learners would be provided.