A Study On Oral English Complexity Under Different Task Type And Task Complexity

Fluency, accuracy, and complexity are the three dimensions of linguistic performance. For many years till now, spoken English teachers in China have been focusing on fluency and accuracy exclusively and have neglected complexity. Accordingly, there is the situation that students only pursue fluency and accuracy, which results in their pacing around a lower level of oral proficiency. Their speaking lacks color and variety and could hardly meet higher communicative demand. This negligence of complexity in teaching may contribute to the disjoint between what students learn and what they put into actual use. How to convert"passive"knowledge into"active"ones is a problem that has been pestering many Chinese English learners and also teachers for a long time. More attention on language complexity could drive students to apply more expressions and sentence patterns into actual use, which would help to improve the current situation. Therefore, this research paper investigated the effects of task type and task complexity on oral complexity, attempting to reveal the effective methods to improve oral complexity and further the overall speaking proficiency. The study was a quantitative analysis which was conducted in Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Fourteen college non-English sophomores participated in the study. After analyzing their oral performance under four tasks which cross two task types (monologic and interactive tasks) and two levels of task complexity (simple version and complex version), the study found task type and task complexity significantly affected certain aspects of oral performance. Task type significantly affects learners'oral complexity on sentence length and their output. Concerning task complexity, it is necessary to distinguish between monologic tasks and interactive tasks. Under monologic task type, task complexity significantly affects lexical variety and output; under interactive task type, task complexity significantly affects sentence length and the number of subordinate clauses. The characteristics of oral complexity under different task type and task complexity were diversified in accordance with the different cognitive demand. The implications to oral task design and English learning from the perspective of oral complexity have been discussed.