Abstract
This study investigates whether task complexity improves L2 English learners’ ability to write contrast and argumentative essays as measured by the use of rhetorical moves and linguistic forms characteristic of these essays. The participants were 62 students in an undergraduate-level composition class in a private university in the U.S. The study involved a first phase that targeted contrast writing and a second phase that targeted argumentative writing. In both phases, students were assigned randomly to a simple or complex task group and wrote an essay in dyads. In terms of rhetorical moves, the complex task group outperformed the simple task group in the immediate and delayed post-test of contrast essays. For argumentative essays, this superiority of the complex group was only found in the immediate post-test. As per linguistic forms, the complex task group outperformed the simple task group in the immediate and delayed post-test of both contrast and argumentative essays.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2021-0111).
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Exploring ESOL teachers’ perspectives on the language learning experiences, challenges, and motivations of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK
- Thai tonal confusion patterns in the production of L1 Chinese Zhuang students
- Lexical measures as a proxy for bilingual language dominance?
- Elicited metaphoric competence in a second language: a construct associated with vocabulary knowledge and general proficiency?
- Model texts in collaborative and individual writing among EFL children: noticing, incorporations, and draft quality
- Investigating Indonesian EFL learners’ knowledge and use of English causative constructions
- The relationship between university EFL teachers’ oral feedback beliefs and practices and the impact of individual differences
- “We thought about it together and the solution came to our minds”: languaging linguistic problem-solving in multilingual Finnish classrooms
- Lexical stress assignment preferences in L2 German
- Focus on form in task repetition through oral and written task modeling
- Prior processing, foreign language classroom anxiety, and L2 fluency
- Analyzing trends in the aural decoding errors of Japanese EFL learners
- Effects of task complexity on the learning of genre specific rhetorical moves and linguistic forms: the case of contrast and argumentative essays
- Glossing and incidental vocabulary learning in L2 reading: a cognitive load perspective
- Factor structures of speed and breakdown fluency in EFL learners’ story retelling performances
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