Effects of task repetition on L2 oral performance

• Autor(a) principal: Finardi,Kyria Rebeca
• Data de Publicação: 2008
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Trabalhos em Lingüística Aplicada (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-18132008000100003
• topic: L2 speech production; gains in complexity of speech; task repetition

This study departs from the assumption that speaking an L2 is a complex cognitive ability (FORTKAMP, 2000) whose execution seems to involve tradeoff effects among the different goals of speech production, mainly among fluency, accuracy and complexity (BYGATE, 1998, 1999, 2001b; FOSTER e SKEHAN, 1996; SKEHAN e FOSTER, 1995, 2001; SKEHAN, 1998). Bygate (2001b) studied the effects of task familiarity on L2 speech performance. He found that in repeating a narrative task there were gains in terms of complexity of speech and these gains were achieved at the cost of a loss especially in accuracy. The present study investigated whether the results reported in Bygate (2001b) would be similar in the case of a repetition of a picture description task. According to Robinson (2001), a description is less complex than a narrative task. Four measures of speech performance were calculated following Fortkamp (2000): fluency, accuracy, complexity and lexical density. Results indicate gains in complexity and these gains seem to have been paid, especially by gains in accuracy, thus corroborating Bygate´s (2001b) findings for this task condition.