The Effect Of Task Complexity On Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of Past Counterfactual Construction

Tasks have received a growing amount of attention in SLA research for the past decade. On the basis of the cognitive and interactive perspectives of task research, the cognition hypothesis claims that increasing task complexity along the resource-directing dimension promotes greater interaction and feedback, thus facilitating second language(L2) development(Robinson 2001 b, 2007a). A large volume of studies have been conducted to examine the effect of task complexity by focusing on the accuracy, complexity, and fluency of L2 production. To date, very little research has explored the effect of task complexity on the learning of linguistic constructions. To help address this gap, the present study examined how increasing the task complexity by manipulating the degree of reasoning demands can influence the acquisition of English past counterfactual conditional construction under the condition where recasts are provided. Two aspects of the knowledge of the target structure were considered: oral productive knowledge and written receptive knowledge.The participants were 45 adult learners of English as a foreign language at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. They were from two grades: 6 were Grade-one non-English graduate students, 39 were Grade-Two non-English majors. They all majored in languages. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups: two experimental groups and a control group. Experimental groups were assigned sentence-formation tasks with reasoning demand while the control group was given sentence-formation tasks without reasoning demand. Both experimental groups received recasts but differed as to whether they performed tasks with higher reasoning demands or tasks with lower reasoning demands. A pretest-immediate posttest-delayed posttest design was employed to detect any improvement in participants' ability to use the linguistic target, which was the past counterfactual construction in the present study. Specifically, an oral productive test was employed to measure changes in participants' oral productive knowledge and a written receptive test package consisting of two written subtests were administered to measure changes in participants' written receptive knowledge.The major findings are:(1) the complex group and the simple group did not differ significantly in the performance on oral production tests, which proved that task complexity does not have a substantial impact on the acquisition of the oral productive knowledge of English past counterfactual construction;(2) a significant group-by-oral test type interaction was detected, specifically, the simple group scored significantly higher than the complex group on the immediate oral posttests. Besides, in the simple task condition, the frequency of recast with feedback included on if clause in the second treatment were much lower than that in the first treatment. These two findings seem to indicate the simple task condition's advantage in facilitating the instant learning of oral productive knowledge of English past counterfactual conditional.(3) In order to examine the effect of task complexity on the acquisition of written receptive knowledge of the target structure, we employed a two-way ANOVA with group as the between-subjects variable and written test type as the within-subjects factor and LSD post hoc tests. The results demonstrated that complex group and the simple group displayed no significant difference in the performance at the written tests and no significant test type-by-group interaction. Overall, we found no substantial impact of task complexity on the acquisition of written receptive knowledge of English past counterfactual construction.(4) Although no significant difference was detected between the two experimental groups in the performance at the assessment tests, both experimental groups outperformed the control group in the learning outcome of both oral productive knowledge and written receptive knowledge. This finding has an implication on classroom teaching: tasks with reasoning demands facilitate the acquisition of English past counterfactual conditionals.