A Study On The Effects Of Task Types And Preparation Time On The Oral Complexity Of Intermediate Chinese Learners

Complexity,fluency and accuracy are three aspects to measure students' oral output level of second language.Among them,oral complexity measures the degree to which learners are able to use rich and varied,advanced and complex words and language structures.Learners with high oral complexity are often able to use relatively complex and diverse words to express themselves,while students with low oral complexity can only use simple words and sentences.However,in the current teaching of Chinese as a foreign language,the improvement of students' oral complexity is not paid much attention to.In the existing oral language related studies,oral complexity has not received the same attention as fluency and accuracy.Many studies have shown that different types of tasks and preparation time will affect learners' oral output,but no consistent conclusion has been reached.Moreover,few studies have taken Chinese L2 learners as the research object,and the literature on the interaction between task type and preparation time on L2 oral output is even less.The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of these two factors on the oral complexity of intermediate level Chinese learners in a more comprehensive and in-depth way,and to discuss the research results in combination with relevant L2 output theories,in order to provide guidance for task selection and design in L2 oral Chinese teaching.The research questions are as follows:(1)Do different types of tasks significantly affect the complexity of L2 learners'oral output?(2)Can providing pre-task preparation time improve the complexity of Chinese second language learners' oral output?(3)Is there an interaction between task type and preparation time on the complexity of L2 learners' oral output?In order to answer the above questions,this study took 72 overseas students from Northeast Normal University and Nanjing Normal University as subjects,and randomly divided them into 4 groups with 18 students in each group.They completed the task of looking at the picture and speaking or expressing a topic with or without preparation time.After the task was completed,an in-depth interview was conducted to understand the cognitive process of the subjects.The results are as follows:(1)The type of task has an impact on the oral complexity of intermediate Chinese learners,and the performance of learners in speaking by looking at pictures is not as good as that of topic expression.However,the effect of task types on intermediate Chinese learners only reached a significant level in terms of vocabulary difficulty,but did not reach a significant level in terms of vocabulary diversity and syntax complexity.(2)Providing preparation time can improve learners' oral complexity,and the three dimensions of lexical diversity,lexical difficulty and syntactic complexity are statistically significant.(3)There is no interaction between task type and preparation time on the oral complexity of intermediate Chinese learners.