THE EFFECTS OF TASK COMPLEXITY AND PEER GROUPINGS ON INDIVIDUAL L2 ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING: A STUDY AMONG MALAYSIAN ESL LEARNERS

THE EFFECTS OF TASK COMPLEXITY AND PEER GROUPINGS ON INDIVIDUAL L2 ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING: A STUDY AMONG MALAYSIAN ESL LEARNERS

Author:  Soh Siak Bie, Tam Shu Sim, L.А. Nikitina

Affiliation:  University of Malaya

Abstract:  This study has adopted the Cognition Hypothesis to examine the effects of task complexity and task condition on individual L2 argumentative writing. The linguistic measures of the written production assessed in this study were Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency (CAF). A repeated-measures ANOVA test analyzed the data collected from 36 Malaysian university students who produced
216 essays.
The findings partially supported the Cognition Hypothesis. The authors found out that increasing task complexity led to a higher accuracy in the individual L2 written productions in terms of error-free clauses. However, this was not the case as far as the fluency or the number of words per
T-unit was concerned. It was found that increasing task complexity resulted in lengthier individual L2 written texts.
In addition, the findings indicated that the number of participants in the peer discussions prior to the individual L2 writing sessions had impacted some dimensions of the learners’ linguistic productions, namely, the syntactic complexity and accuracy.

Keywords:  L2 writing, argumentative writing, Cognition Hypothesis, task complexity, task condition

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For citation:  Soh, Bie Siak, Tam, Shu Sim, & Nikitina, L. А. (2020). The Effects of Task Complexity and Peer Groupings on Individual L2 Argumentative Writing: A Study among Malaysian ESL Learners. Voprosy Kognitivnoy Lingvistiki, 1, 22-39.

Pages:  22-39