چکیده:
Drawing on Robinson’s cognition hypothesis, the study attempted to
examine how task conditions influence EFL learners’ oral
performance and whether learners’ individual differences in terms of
tolerance of ambiguity and self-efficacy mediate the effects of such
conditions. To this end, 62 Iranian intermediate EFL learners from
private language institutes in Tehran performed four dyadic decisionmaking
tasks manipulated along task conditions of information
distribution and goal orientation. Their performance was measured
through complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) indices. Their
tolerance of ambiguity and self-efficacy were assessed using separate
questionnaires. The results indicated that information distribution and
goal orientation could significantly impact the participants’
performance on the tasks. As to the CAF indices, it seemed that
Skehan’s (2016) trade-off hypothesis was a better fit than Robinson’s
(2015) cognition hypothesis since trade-offs were found between
complexity and accuracy/fluency. The results of the correlations
revealed that there were a number of significant positive relationships
between tolerance of ambiguity and the CAF indices on the one hand
and self-efficacy and the CAF indices on the other. While the former
relationships did not confirm the specific prediction of the cognition
hypothesis, the latter relationships did. Overall, the findings contribute
to Robinson’s hypothesis concerned with the effects of task conditions
on oral performance and the mediating role of individual differences,
and have implications for task sequencing and task-based teaching.
خلاصه ماشینی:
com Abstract Drawing on Robinson’s cognition hypothesis, the study attempted to examine how task conditions influence EFL learners’ oral performance and whether learners’ individual differences in terms of tolerance of ambiguity and self-efficacy mediate the effects of such conditions.
To this end, 62 Iranian intermediate EFL learners from private language institutes in Tehran performed four dyadic decision- making tasks manipulated along task conditions of information distribution and goal orientation.
Keywords: task condition, individual differences, tolerance of ambiguity,self-efficacy, CAF Received: 01/01/2017 Accepted: 13/02/2017 Corresponding author During the last three decades, task-based language teaching has gained in popularity because of its research bases from a variety of perspectives such as second language acquisition, pedagogy, education, and philosophy (Long, 2015).
Taking up the legacy left by the researchers who have conducted studies under Robinson’s framework, the present study aims to investigate how two affective factors namely tolerance of ambiguity and self-efficacy mediate Iranian EFL learners’ oral performance on dyadic decision- making tasks manipulated along task conditions of information distribution and goal orientation.
These positive correlations indicated that high levels of self-efficacy on the part of the participants were associated with higher complexity on the performance of all the decision-making tasks as measured by syntactic complexity.
These positive correlations indicated that high levels of self-efficacy on the part of the participants were associated with higher fluency on the performance of all the tasks as measured by speech rate.