AsiaTEFL Logo        The Journal of Asia TEFL
   
The Journal of Asia TEFL
Articles By Subject
Current Issue
Past Issues
Special Issue
Information of the Journal
Editorial Board
Submission Guidelines
Ethical Guidelines
Manuscript Submission
Journal Order
Search
Today 1,193
Total 3,774,955
Past Issues
Go List

Volume 5 Number 1, Spring 2008, Pages 1-157   


PDF Download
   

The Effect of Task Demands of Intentional Reasoning on L2 Speech Performance

    Tomohito Ishikawa


The present study examined effects of task demands on second language speech performance by manipulating the task complexity dimension of intentional reasoning, which was proposed as one of the task complexity features by Robinson (2007a). Twenty-four Japanese college students participated in the study and performed a control task and two intentional reasoning tasks. Six production measures of fluency, complexity and accuracy were employed in order to test whether intentional reasoning would lead to increases in accuracy and complexity at the cost of fluency, as predicted by the Cognition Hypothesis (e.g., Robinson, 2005, 2007a). The results showed that intentional reasoning produced 1) positive effects on syntactic as well as lexical complexity and accuracy, and 2) a negative effect on fluency (i.e., disfluency).

Keywords: task complexity, the cognition hypothesis, intentional reasoning