Abstract
To explore more about task performance in second language acquisition research, how task performance is measured turns out to be an indispensible topic with much concern from different perspectives. The present study takes the cognitive perspective to analyze the measures of the different aspects of task performance, i.e. fluency, complexity, accuracy and lexical performance. It is revealed that for the same construct of performance measures, different features are involved in different indexes. Multivariate measures of the same construct need to be adopted to seek an overall picture of learners’ task performance.
Highlights
In task-based research, how task performance is measured stands as a topic with crucial significance
Interactionists focus on the indices for the negotiation of meaning, such as clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks, recasts and uptakes (Russell & Spada, 2006); Researchers based on the sociocultural theory prefer to the measures of interactive and language involvement, such as language-related episodes (LREs) and turns (Lowen, 2005).Working in the framework of the cognitive approach, researchers distinguish oral performance in the following directions: fluency, accuracy, complexity, and recently the lexical aspects of performance (Skehan, 1998; Skehan & Foster, 2005; Yuan & Ellis, 2003)
The present study focuses on the cognitive perspective for task performance measures
Summary
In task-based research, how task performance is measured stands as a topic with crucial significance. Task performance measures vary greatly among task researchers. The different measures of task performance adopted in different studies have reflected researchers’ theoretical positions (Skehan, 2003). The present study focuses on the cognitive perspective for task performance measures. The measures of complexity, accuracy, fluency and lexical performance are taken under exploration in this study. Even for the same construct of task performance (e.g. complexity), different measures are used across studies in the literature (Ortega, 2003)
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