Text: Factors that influence the difficulty of a task

When creating your lesson plan, activity, and overall curriculum one of the key elements to consider is the language level of your students and the language level you plan to achieve in your classes. If an assignment is too easy, it will not be challenging enough for the student to actually provide them with new knowledge, while on the other hand if an assignment is too difficult, it can demotivate students, making them focus on getting the "right" answer rather than the learning process.

Learning difficulty can be fine-tuned for a particular pedagogical purpose: tasks can be designed to match students' level of proficiency. There are several ways to "measure" the difficulty of a task, but here we will focus on one that allows a task to be adjusted based on:

  • Language needed to complete the task (language complexity)
  • Thinking skills needed by students to complete the task (cognitive complexity)
  • Conditions under which the task must be completed (communicative stress)

We selected this framework because it clearly shows which components can be modified to vary the level of the task, allowing the teacher to have different options depending on their students. 

By changing one/some/all of the components below, the teacher can change the difficulty level of the assigned task.