Effects of cognitive task complexity on L2 written output

The question that which type of writing tasks learners exhibit their skills and improve their language proficiency receives different answers. Whether a language task, which requires attention, memory, reasoning, with low and high levels of syntactic complexity is likely to affect text quality, accuracy, grammar and vocabulary range is debated. The view that higher syntactic complexity for a task is likely to have learners produce more errors (Skehan & Foster, 2001) competes with the view that it will result in better, less flawed writing output (Robinson, 2001). To test the claims of the two views, the study reports on an experiment to investigate whether syntactic task complexity in writing performances is a predictor of text accuracy, syntactic complexity, lexical variation, text length and quality. The data were obtained from two homogenous groups, easy and complex, who were assigned easy and complex writing tasks. The findings reveal that manipulating levels of cognitive task complexity does not have overarching effects on the dependent variables investigated. Nonetheless, tasks requiring higher cognitive skills produced better results on the measures of accuracy and text quality