Effects of Task Complexity and Planning on L2 Spoken Performance and Attentional Allocation to Meaning and Form of Korean High School Students

Abstract

The present thesis explored combined effects of task complexity (controlled through +/-here-and-now) and planning on performances of Korean high school students with low-intermediate L2 speaking proficiency in two areas: spoken performances in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) and cognitive psychological performances of attentional allocation to linguistic aspects during planning. In this study, 40 eleventh-grade Korean high school students with low-intermediate English speaking proficiency completed four sets of picture description tasks in different conditions: simple no planning (SN), complex no planning (CN), simple planning (SP) and complex planning (CP). In order to investigate the students planning processes, the learners were instructed to complete the questionnaires after the planned conditions (SP and CP). According to the results of the study, task complexity and planning were shown to influence diverse aspects of CAF

that is, task complexity positively influenced syntactic complexity and accuracy with solely syntactic complexity reaching a significance level, while negatively influencing lexical complexity and fluency with solely the decrease in lexical complexity being statistically significant. With respect to planning, syntactic complexity and fluency were considerably higher, whereas accuracy and lexical complexity were slightly negatively affected. Along with the individual effects of the two IVs, interaction effects on lexical complexity and accuracy were observed

that is, learners productions were positively influenced on these aspects to a substantial degree, while neither of the two factors solely had a significant impact in the two aspects. In addition to the learners performance scores (i.e., CAF), individual learners responses to the questionnaires in SP and CP provided evidence of visible changes in learners attentional allocation depending on tasks differing in complexity

despite their predisposition towards meaning in planned conditions, particularly in the simple planned condition (SP), learners attention—which was likely employed inefficiently—was successfully directed to formal aspects in the complex planned condition (CP) given the combined effects of resource-directing (i.e., +/-here-and-now) and resource-dispersing (i.e., strategic planning) dimensions in CP. The findings of the present study suggest the following pedagogical implications: a) various pedagogical goals may be obtainable through differential manipulation of resource-directing and/or dispersing dimensions

b) learners should be encouraged to adopt a positive attitude toward planning to maximize the potential benefits of planning

and c) an awareness about the nature of learners L2 speaking performances needs to be developed to encompass multiple factors in accounting for their observed performances.