Manipulation of Task Complexity And L2 Oral Production

This paper presents the findings of a study conducted to find the effects of manipulating task complexity on the Second Language (L2) oral production among the Business Administration undergraduates of the University of Jaffna during their first semester in 2016. Twenty seniors took part in the study. They accomplished two tasks of different complexity levels. The tasks were models of activities a receptionist perform at hotels. The simple task was to describe the different room options offered by the hotel to choose from. In the complex version, the participants reallocated the customers due to some unavoidable circumstance. They had to make decision based on the client and hotel profiles available regarding these. A pretest - posttest design was used to measure the performance of the participants in the study. The results of paired samples t-tests showed a significant increase in fluency while accuracy and syntactic and lexical complexity did not show any significant difference, after the performance of the simple task. With the increase in complexity of the task through number of elements involved and the addition of reasoning demands, the results revealed an increase in accuracy