期刊名称：International Journal of Social Sciences and Education
印刷版ISSN：2227-393X
电子版ISSN：2223-4934
出版年度：2016
卷号：6
期号：1
页码：110
出版社：Federal College of Education
摘要：This study attempted to explore the effect of manipulating task complexity on narrative writing quality of male and female Iranian EFL learners in terms of lexical complexity, fluency, grammatical accuracy, and syntactic c omplexity. Task complexity was manipulated through applying resource-dispersing dimensions. All 60 participants (30 males and 30 females) who were university students were randomly assigned into one of the three groups: (a) topic; (b) topic + idea; and (c) topic + idea + discourse marker group. One-way ANOVAs wer e utilized to detect significant differences among the groups. Results showed that increasing task complexity: 1. did not lead to differences in lexical complexity (measured by the ratio of lexical words to function words and lexical density), but it did lead to significant differences when mean segmental type-token ratio was used to measure lexical complexity; 2. Produced significantly less fluent language; 3. Resulted in more grammatically accurate language in the least complex task; and 4. Demonstrate significant difference in syntactic complexity (when it was measured by the ratio of dependent clauses to total clauses). Further findings and implications are discussed
