چکیده:
This article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was affected and to investigate possible overlaps between EFL learners’ perceptions of task difficulty and hypothesized task complexity. A purposive sample of 54 first-year EFL learners randomly assigned to two parallel conversation classes in an English department of a major public university participated in the study and performed listening tasks in a language lab. The instruments used for data collection were seven tasks taken from a TOEFL Test Preparation Kit, each followed by listening comprehension questions and an item on the participants’ personal perception of the difficulty of the task. During counter-balanced administrations, the tasks were manipulated for one of the four dimensions of task difficulty (adequacy, immediacy, perspective, and prior knowledge). The resulting data included the participants’ perception of difficulty as well as their performance scores under less complex and more complex conditions. One-sample T-test and correlation analyses of the data revealed that for all of the four complexity dimensions, the hypothesized less complex task condition led to better learner performance. The correlation between learner-assigned difficulty score for the task at hand and theoretical task complexity level was significant only for the immediacy dimension (r=-0.67, p
خلاصه ماشینی:
"The Effects of Task Complexity on English Language Learners’ Listening Comprehension Abbas Zare-ee Assistant Professor, University of Kashan, Iran Received: May 25, 2012; Accepted: October 20, 2012 Abstract This article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL).
In spite of the emphasis on the significance of tasks in L2 teaching and learning and the importance of properly organizing tasks based on task complexity, there is little empirical evidence on how the manipulation of dimensions of complexity might affect learners of English in their EFL listening task performance.
Do variations in task complexity dimensions of adequacy, immediacy, perspective, and prior knowledge affect undergraduate EFL learners’ listening performance scores under less and more complex conditions?
RESULTS Research Question 1: The Effect of Task Complexity Manipulations on Listening Task Performance Four dimensions of task complexity including adequacy, immediacy, perspective, and prior knowledge were changed one at a time to manipulate task complexity levels and to check the effects as reflected in the participants’ mean listening comprehension scores.
This relatively strong negative correlation coefficient indicates that as complexity increased in the immediacy dimension, learners perceived the task as more difficult and assigned lower scores when they had no time to explore the listening comprehension test items before doing the task.
These goals were achieved through altering the complexity level of selected tasks along four dimensions of adequacy, immediacy, perspective, and prior knowledge and then through measuring the effects on listening comprehension and learner perception."