Abstract
Tasked –Based Language Teaching has widely provided learners some opportunities to learn spoken and written language through learning activities in the major of English Language Teaching (ELT). A growing body of research on the effects of task complexity on written productions, the present study explored the impacts of task complexity and strategic planning time on ESL learners’ written performance in terms of accuracy. To this end, forty-five undergraduate English Language Learners, both male and female (within the age range of 17-25) have been recruited from Aligarh Muslim University. Two tasks were chosen as instruments for data collection. One is an argumentative essay and the other is a narrative task to measure the accuracy of the participants’ written production, under different planning conditions (pre-task planning, within-task planning, and no planning). One-way MANOVA was employed as the statistical means of analysis. The findings revealed a significant effect of task complexity under different planning conditions on Error-free clauses (the percentage of clauses that do not contain any errors) and correct verb forms (the percentage of accurately used verbs in terms of tense, aspect, modality, and subject-verb agreement) regarding accuracy.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, in language education and learning tasks have been the concentration of attention as a unit of analysis [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Research into Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is essentially conducted due to deal with the problem of determining the related classifying and sequencing principles for designing and organizing tasks for task-based syllabi [9,10,11] and has mostly concentrated on discovering the effects of task design and task characteristics on task performance [12], [13,14,15,16], believed that TBLT is a response to a better understanding of language learning process. [17], divided planning time in the field of task-based language teaching into pre-task planning, planning happens before the performance of the task and within task planning regarding when planning takes place
This study investigates the effects of task complexity and strategic task planning on ESL learners’ written performance in terms of accuracy, based on two different cognitively demanding tasks, namely, argumentative essay and narrative task writing under different planning conditions
Summary
Since the 1990s, in language education and learning tasks have been the concentration of attention as a unit of analysis [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Task-based language teaching (TBLT) uses the task as the essential unit of its analysis and emphasize the creation of meaning without any preceding instruction of language forms. Several studies have been accomplished on the effect of different task characteristics on L2 learners’ performance but, few studies have been carried out to investigate the effects of task complexity and strategic planning time. Limited and increasing the complexity of tasks reduce attention capacity. As their attentional limits are reached, learners will prioritize processing for meaning over processing for form. Attending to one aspect of performance (complexity, accuracy, or fluency of language) may well mean that other dimensions suffer due to the learner's processing capacity
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