Effects of Task Repetition on the Fluency, Complexity and Accuracy of Iranian EFL Learners Oral Discourse
Effects of Task Repetition on the Fluency, Complexity and Accuracy of Iranian EFL Learners Oral Discourse
Keywords: task, repetition, fluency, accuracy, complexity, oral discourse
Parviz Birjandi
Parviz Birjandi Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch
Saeideh Ahangari
Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch
Bio Data
Parviz Birjandi is a full professor holding an M.A in applied linguistics from the Colorado State University and a Ph.D in English education; minor: Research methods and statistics from the University of Colorado. He is currently the Dean of the College of Foreign Languages and Persian Literature in the Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch. He has published 15 articles in the area of TEFL and he is the author of English textbooks for high school and pre-university levels, used nation wide, 5 university textbooks and 4 practice textbooks.
Saeideh Ahangari is a Ph.D. candidate of TEFL at the Islamic Azad University/Science and Research Branch. She has an M.A in Teaching English from the University of Tabriz. She has recently completed her Ph.D studies in the Islamic Azad University/Science and Research Branch. She is a lecturer at the Islamic Azad University/Tabriz Branch and currently she is the Head of the English Department in that university. She has published and presented papers in international conferences and journals.
A more recent trend within communicative approaches has been to consider how attention can be profitably channeled through the instructional choices that are made (Schmidt, 1999). The assumption is that learners have available limited attentional capacities, that the different components of language production and comprehension compete for such limited capacities. The more that a learner tries to hold in his or her head at a given moment, the harder the learning is and the more likely there will be a cognitive overload (Oxford, 2006, p. 51).
A number of proposals have been made as to how some attention may be focused on form. It can be done through task design (Fotos & Ellis, 1991), pre-task and post-task activities( Doughty, 1991), conciousness-raising activities( Willis, 1996). In this research we approach the issue of attention from a different but related perspective. Our study focused on the ability learners have to utilize their L2 knowledge in production. We investigated if there is an evidence of target like production when the need to focus on meaning has been minimized through task repetition, thereby freeing learners to attend to form, not from input, but from their own internal system.
To examine the effects of task repetition and task type on fluency, accuracy, and Complexity, the researcher assigned 120 students to 6 groups; the narrative task performers, personal task performers and decision-making task performers in the male and female groups. Data was collected using a 2x2x3 factorial design. The first production of the subjects was measured for fluency, accuracy, and complexity. Then after a week all the subjects did the same task again, and their second production was also measured for fluency, accuracy, and complexity. The t-test results and the analysis of variance indicated that task repetition, and task type, as well as the interaction between these variables resulted in significant differences in subjects oral discourse in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexity.
See page 28-52
[/private]Category: Main Editions, Volume 10 Issue 3
