Effects of Task Complexity and Sequencing on the Oral Performance of L2 Korean Learners

ABSTRACT This study was designed to investigate the effects of task complexity and sequence on the oral performance of L2 Korean learners. The research involved 40 graduate and 4 undergraduate students from a university in Seoul, South Korea, who were assigned two tasks. The task complexity varied in the elements and reasoning demands of the picture-cued storytelling tasks. Additionally, the tasks were presented in two sequences: simple to complex and vice versa. The results indicated that the participants’ linguistic accuracy and fluency declined during the performance of the complex task. The participants produced more complex language when tackling complex tasks, although the difference was not statistically significant in all of the complexity indices. Interestingly, the task sequences did not influence oral performance. The decline in accuracy during the complex task aligns with Skehan’s Limited Attention Capacity approach rather than Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis. Furthermore, focusing on the Korean language, which is typologically distant from English, this article claims significance for investigating how each dimension of the learners’ language is affected by task complexity. These findings contribute to the decades-long debates of task-based language teaching and provide insights into the unique case of the uncommon target language, Korean.