Effects of procedural task repetition and task complexity on the oral production of Portuguese foreign language: exploratory study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.4800Keywords:
Task-Based Language Teaching, Task repetition, Cognitive complexity, Oral production, Portuguese as a foreign languageAbstract
This study presents an exploratory analysis on the effects of immediate procedural task repetition on the oral production of Portuguese learners as a foreign language (PFL). Measures of complexity, accuracy and fluency were used. Following the results of a pilot study, three tasks with different cognitive demands (simple, complex, more complex) were arranged. Each task was performed three times and each performance was based on different stories, perceived as similar in terms of cognitive complexity. Twenty-one university learners of PFL participated in this study. Results showed that task repetition had a positive impact on the simple task in terms of accuracy. On the more complex task, the effect was significant on syntactic complexity (subordination) and fluency (speech rate). The impact of task repetition was higher on the second performance of the task. Procedural task repetition can be an effective methodological option for Task-Based Language Teaching in PFL. Pedagogical implications of this study are discussed.
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