Effects of Task Complexity on Chinese EFL Learners' Language Production in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

The pervasive use of synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in second language (L2) learning has generated increasing interest among researchers in integrating SCMC with task-based language teaching (TBLT). This study examined the effects of task complexity on Chinese EFL learners' language production in SCMC modality to develop optimal tasks that facilitate the learning of English in SCMC environments. Eighty-four intermediate Chinese EFL learners completed two interactive tasks (simple and complex) in dyads via text-based or video-based SCMC. Their English productions were transcribed and coded in terms of syntactic complexity, lexical complexity and accuracy for statistical analyses. The results indicated that increasing task complexity elicited significantly lower syntactic complexity in text-based SCMC, but without significant effects on syntactic complexity in video-based SCMC. Significantly higher lexical complexity and unaffected accuracy were observed in both SCMC modes as a result of an increase in task complexity. Regarding SCMC modality, text-based SCMC resulted in significantly lower syntactic complexity, but significantly higher lexical complexity and accuracy than video-based SCMC. Effects of Simple and Complex Tasks on Chinese Students' English Language Production when conducted using Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication PlatformThe purpose of this study is to find out the effects that simple and complex tasks have on Chinese students' English language production when conducted using synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) platform that enables text-based and video-based interaction. Eighty-four intermediate Chinese EFL learners completed the simple and complex tasks in pairs via text-based or video-based SCMC. The students' interactions were transcribed and analyzed for their complexity in terms of sentence structure and choice of words, and grammatical accuracy. The results revealed that increasing the complexity of tasks led to a significantly lower complexity of the students' sentence structure in text-based SCMC but no significant effect in video-based SCMC. Furthermore, it also led to a significantly higher complexity of choice of words and no change in terms of grammatical accuracy for both the text-based and video-based SCMC. When comparing between text-based with video-based SCMC, it was found that text-based SCMC resulted in significantly lower complexity of sentence structure but significantly higher complexity on their choice of words and grammatical accuracy.