The difficulty of speaking tasks has only recently become a topic of investigation in language testing. This has been prompted by work on discourse variability in second language acquisition (SLA) research, new classificatory systems for describing tasks, and the advent of statistical techniques that enable the prediction of task difficulty. This article reviews assumptions underlying approaches to research into speaking task difficulty and questions the view that test scores always vary with task conditions or discourse variation. A new approach to defining task difficulty in terms of the interaction between pragmatic task features and first language (L1) cultural background is offered, and the results of a study to investigate the impact of these variables on test scores are presented. The relevance for the generalizability of score meaning and the definition of constructs in speaking tests is discussed.

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This article examines the results of a contrastive empirical study of conventional indirect requests in Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish. The results reveal pragmatic similarities at the level of the linguistic encoding of utterances with both, Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish speakers showing a negative correlation between (in)directness and social distance. The less familiar the interlocutors are with each other, the more likely it is for their requests to be realised indirectly. On the other hand, pragmatic differences were found in the tentativeness conveyed by the requests in these two language varieties. Uruguayan Spanish requests were more tentative than those in Peninsular Spanish. This tentativeness was achieved through a more frequent and more varied use of external modifications and a much higher incidence of internal modificating devices of the downgrading type.