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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Task Complexity and Second Language Teaching
GAO Hai-long
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8072/2016.12.002
China Youth University of Political Studies, Beijing, China
In the past few years, the notion of task complexity has been receiving substantial attention in the field of second language acquisition. This paper explores task complexity from the cognitive perspective by analyzing two studies with Skehan’s limited capacity hypothesis and Robinson’s cognition hypothesis. The two studies, namely You-Jin Kim’s (2012) and Mirdamadi and Jong (2015), explore on how linguistic complexity affects language performance. Two hypotheses, Skehan’s limited capacity hypothesis and Robinson’s cognition hypothesis, explain the two studies from the cognitive perspective by predicting either that increasing task complexity reduces a pool of attentional capacity during task performance or that increasing complex tasks promotes greater accuracy and complexity of speech and writing. It is suggested that language teaching, syllabus designing in particular, should be based on the basis of task complexity.
task complexity, limited capacity hypothesis, cognition hypothesis
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