Task design and EFL learners' oral production: Investigating combined effects of information grounding and task structure

Abstract

This study is targeted at investigating the effects of design features of narrative tasks on the oral performance of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). To this aim, it explored the combined effects of information grounding and inherent task structure on complexity, accuracy, and fluency in participants' oral production. In doing so, the effects of performing four oral narrative tasks which differed in terms of information grounding and inherent structure on learners' complexity, accuracy, and fluency in producing English language were examined. Sixty Iranian intermediate-level EFL learners participated in this study. Using a between-groups design, the researchers required each participant to recount one of the narratives on a random basis. The results of one-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) revealed that participants' performance in the tightly structured narrative tasks was significantly more accurate and to a great extent more fluent than that in the loosely structured ones. The outcomes also indicated that more syntactic complexity was associated with narratives that had both foreground and background storylines. Additionally and more importantly, it was found that performing a tightly structured narrative in which information is presented in both foreground and background significantly advantages complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The outcomes have certain pedagogical implications for practitioners in EFL context.