Length Constraint as Task Demand: Exploring L2 Oral Performance Variability

چکیده مقاله

Variation in EFL performance has been assigned to factors which claim learners‘

attentional resources. They fall under the major labelling of task

difficulty/complexity. A number of factors have been argued to bring about task

complexity, which lead correspondingly to variations in L2 performance. One

crucial condition responsible for variability is planning. The present experimental

study investigates length constraint as an instance of planning and answers the

following research question: Does length planning as task condition bring about

any L2 speech variations in terms of lexical density, lexical diversity and

grammatical accuracy. This paper specifically focuses on 34 EFL learners‘

performance on length-constrained versus non-length-constrained oral

reproduction tasks that were recorded and coded for lexical density, lexical

diversity and grammatical accuracy. Results indicate statistically significant

variations across the two performances with regard to lexical density and lexical

diversity, but not grammatical accuracy.