The Effect of Task Design and Language Proficiency on Oral Output

This study investigates the impact of storyline complexity and language proficiency level on oral performance. The participants were 42 English learners of different proficiency levels. Each participant was asked to narrate two stories (with or without background events) based on two picture stories. They were given each of the picture prompts one at a time and were told that they had 3 minutes to look at each picture prompt and plan for what to say and how to narrate the story. After that, they had 3-4 minutes to tell each story during which time their performance was recorded. The recorded performances were transcribed and coded to measure the complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The results indicated that syntactic complexity of performance was related to the storyline complexity. Greater storyline complexity also helped high-proficiency learners to perform more fluently. However, it had no significant effect on accuracy. The results further revealed that the high-proficient learners outperformed low-proficient learners. The results also showed that no significant interaction effect of storyline complexity and language proficiency level on oral performance was established.