Bachman and Palmer (1996), for example, discussed four major categories of individual characteristics of test-takers, including personal characteristics (e.g., age, sex, and native language), the topical knowledge that test-takers bring to the language testing situation, their affective schemata, and language ability.
Based on this model, test takers tried to retrieve different aspects of language knowledge including knowledge of grammar and choice of vocabulary, cohesion and coherence, topical knowledge related to the topic of GPT, select the appropriate aspect of their relevant and available knowledge, and put them down into written responses.
Besides, the background knowledge of students, and lack of topical knowledge affected their anxiety as familiarity with the topics of conversations decreases their anxiety.
In the present study, the relationships between these different resources of writers (linguistic knowledge, topical knowledge, writing background) and writing performance will be quantitatively measured.
The strategy scales include both metacognitive strategy (referring to mental awareness, e.g. can anticipate the goal of listening in familiar settings and pay attention to key information), and cognitive listening strategy (referring to specific approaches taken to assist comprehension, e.g. can use topical knowledge and context clues to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words).
Presented here are new concepts and notional architectures to solve the problem of how to take the fuzziness of information content and drive it toward context-specific topical knowledge development.
Language use is influenced by characteristics of individuals, including personal characteristics, topical knowledge, affective schemata, and by language ability, which includes language knowledge and strategic competence.
Firstly, inadequate test-taker qualities such as topical knowledge, language knowledge, personal trait, strategic competence, and effective schemata may cause anxiety (Bachman and Palmer, 1996).
In writing about Communicative Language Ability (CLA), Bachman and later Bachman and Palmer describe attributes that test takers bring to an assessment situation such as their topical knowledge, language knowledge, and personal characteristics.
These main components of strategic competence or metacognitive strategies interact with other areas of language ability (language knowledge), topical knowledge, and affective schemata features of context in which language use takes place.
Lack of topical knowledge or interest was reported by Parisa to cause high speaking anxiety for she had no idea what to talk about and how to put it, but Maryam, Yasaman, and Sara mentioned that they were not anxious in such situations as they were supposed to encounter them someday (interview 5, February, 2016).
