Increasing the reasoning demands of a task and task sequencing on the oral production of Chinese learners of Portuguese as a foreign language

Abstract

This study had two aims: (1) investigating the impact of increasing the reasoning demands of a monologic narrative task on the oral performance of Chinese learners of Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL) and (2) testing the Simplify Stabilize Automatize Restructure Complexify (SSARC) Model of the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2010, 2011, 2015). 52 university learners of PFL participated in this research. Two comparisons were made: (1) the first one within subjects where two tasks (simple vs. complex) were performed on two conditions (simple-complex sequence/complex-simple sequence) and (2) the second one among subjects where two tasks were performed vs. the individual performance of a task (simple or complex task).  Measures of linguistic complexity, accuracy, and fluency were used to quantify learners’ oral production. Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis has been partially confirmed, as results showed that task complexity positively affected accuracy, lexical diversity, and the amount of coordinate clauses, but with a negative effect on clause length. Task sequencing had a positive impact on accuracy.