dc.description.abstract | 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 | |