ABSTRACT

Background and purpose: Previous research suggests that task complexity impacts second language learners’ task performance. The majority of these studies focused on production skills such as speaking and writing, while very little research has examined receptive skills. The current study investigated the role of task complexity in students’ perception of task difficulty and their comprehension of authentic listening tasks in English for Academic Purposes classes.

Methods: Thirty-one English as a Second Language (ESL) learners were randomly assigned to simple or complex conditions. The complex condition was composed of two authentic lectures, whereas the simple condition contained a modified version of the same lectures. Using natural language processing tools, task complexity was operationalized as lexical, discourse, and phonological complexity. The results of students’ task difficulty ratings and their listening comprehension scores were compared across the groups while controlling for their language proficiency.

Findings: The findings of the study showed that there was no significant difference in students’ perception of task difficulty level or their comprehension of listening tasks between simple and complex versions. However, their perception of task difficulty was different for the complex and simple tasks when they listened to a lecture about a less familiar topic.

Conclusions: Task complexity manipulated by lexical sophistication, discourse complexity, and phonological complexity might not impact students’ listening comprehension of relatively long lectures. These features might be more closely related to the decoding phase, while comprehension and inferencing, which are necessary for the understanding of long lectures, might be more directly influenced by other variables (e.g., short-term memory).

Pedagogical suggestions: When L2 instructors modify authentic academic texts such as university lectures for listening, lexical sophistication and discourse complexity do not seem to significantly affect students’ perception of difficulty or task performance. Other variables such as speech rate and information density (i.e., the number of ideas in a passage) could be considered for modification in order to create a version which is perceived as being less difficult.