TASK COMPLEXITY FOCUS ON FORM AND SECOND LANGUAGE…任务复杂性聚焦于表单和第二语言.pdfVIP

SSLA, 31, 437–470. Printed in the United States of America. doi:10.1017/S0272263109090366 TASK COMPLEXITY, FOCUS ON FORM, AND SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Andrea Révész Lancaster University Tasks have received increased attention in SLA research for the past decade, as has the role of focus on form. However, few empirical stud- ies have investigated the relationship among tasks, focus-on-form techniques, and second language (L2) learning outcomes. To help ad- dress this gap, the present study examined how the task variable +/− contextual support combined with the focus-on-form technique known as recasting affects L2 morphosyntactic development. The partici- pants were 90 adult learners of English as a foreign language, ran- domly assigned to one of fi ve groups: four comparison groups and a control group. The comparison groups differed as to (a) whether they received recasts while describing photos and (b) whether they could see the photos while describing them. The control group only partici- pated in the testing sessions. A pretest-posttest-delayed posttest de- sign was employed to detect any improvement in participants’ ability to use the linguistic target, which was the past progressive form. Results from multifaceted Rasch measurement yielded two main fi ndings. First, learners who received recasts but did not view photos outperformed learners who received recasts while viewing photos. Second, the group that viewed photos but did not receive recasts achieved greater L2 gains than the group who neither viewed photos nor received recasts. I would like to thank ZhaoHong Han and James Purpura for their insightful comments on the research on which this article is based. I am also grateful to Alison Mackey, Monika Ekiert, Rebecca Sach