This study sought to test Skehan’s (1996, 1998) limited capacity hypothesis and Robinson’s (1995, 2003) cognition hypothesis by investigating the effects of task complexity and pre-task planning on EFL learners’ oral production (see also Genc, this volume). Twenty three Japanese-L1 high school students were given two sets of picture-based narrative tasks: a simple task with fewer characters and a complex task with more characters appearing in cartoon-based stories. Ten of these participants were given pre-task planning time, whereas thirteen were not. The results indicate that (a) the increased task complexity positively affects the specific measure of syntactic complexity, but negatively affects global accuracy and fluency; and (b) planning time positively affects global syntactic complexity, but negatively affects fluency. These findings partially support and partially disconfirm both Robinson’s and Skehan’s hypotheses, posing questions about making blanket predictions on the linguistic consequences of task manipulation. The findings also show the importance of employing task-discourse sensitive measures in investigating the effect of task complexity on learners’ language use. The main value of the findings of the study comes from its focus on Japanese EFL high school students who have limited oral L2 proficiency, a population underrepresented in previous studies, despite their obvious importance for both research and teaching.
2023. Aumento das exigências de raciocínio de uma tarefa e sequenciação na produção oral de aprendizes chineses de português como língua estrangeira. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada 39:4
Farahanynia, Mahsa & Mohammad Khatib
2022. Participatory structure of planning and cognitive task complexity in L2 oral performance: a processing perspective. The Language Learning Journal 50:6 ► pp. 777 ff.
Moore, Paul J.
2022. Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in Japanese EFL Contexts. In International Handbook on Education Development in Asia-Pacific, ► pp. 1 ff.
Moore, Paul J.
2023. Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in Japanese EFL Contexts. In International Handbook on Education Development in the Asia-Pacific, ► pp. 661 ff.
Mohammad Javad Ahmadian & Michael H. Long
2021. The Cambridge Handbook of Task-Based Language Teaching,
2021. The Adoption of Task-Based Language Teaching in Diverse Contexts. In The Cambridge Handbook of Task-Based Language Teaching, ► pp. 649 ff.
Lee, Jiyong
2020. Task closure and task complexity effects on L2 written performance. Journal of Second Language Writing 50 ► pp. 100777 ff.
O’Grady, Stefan
2019. The impact of pre-task planning on speaking test performance for English-medium university admission. Language Testing 36:4 ► pp. 505 ff.
Li, Shaofeng & Mengxia Fu
2018. Strategic and unpressured within-task planning and their associations with working memory. Language Teaching Research 22:2 ► pp. 230 ff.
Skehan, Peter
2016. Tasks Versus Conditions: Two Perspectives on Task Research and Their Implications for Pedagogy. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 36 ► pp. 34 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 november 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.