earticle

영어

This study aims to investigate the comparative effects between simple and complex tasks on lexical diversity, lexical complexity, and syntactic complexity in learners’ English writing performance. Two task complexity dimensions are focused on: the amount of information (+/-Few element) and the use of tense (+/-Here-and-Now) in the task. For the data collection, thirty-one Korean college students were asked to perform four different narrative tasks based on a wordless cartoon. The results revealed that the complex task (-Few element & -Here-and-Now) showed a higher level of lexical diversity and lexical complexity than the simple task (+Few element & +Here-and-Now). In the case of syntactic complexity, the dimension of +/-Here-and-Now caused significantly different uses of the gerund and passive voice. The findings suggest that English language teachers need to control the complexity of narrative tasks when assigning English writing to university-level learners.