the effect of task complexity on learners’ accuracy in writing

New language teaching methods regard a task as a good tool that helps learners to learn language better based on their real-world needs. this view changed teacher-centered class to student-centered class that gives the main role to the learners. today, designing good tasks based on learners’ needs is so important because it can motivate them to learn. so, knowing their needs is also important to design well-formed tasks. task complexity is known as a factor that affects learners’ performance widely. this study is carried out with 50 participants and two tasks with different complexity level to find the effect of complexity on their accuracy of writing. participants had to write two stories in two sessions and through two different methods. the first story was in ‘here and now’ method and they could write a story by looking at pictures in simple present tense. the second story was more complex, i.e., in ‘there and then’ method, participants could look at pictures just for 3 minutes, and then they had to write a story in past sentences by relying on their memory. then two stories were graded based on accuracy in writing for each participant. finally, scores of two tasks based on method prepared by birjandi, jafarpour and farhadi, compared together to explore the effect of complexity on learners’ accuracy of writing. the results analyzed through paired-sample t-test revealed that increasing complexity has no significant effect on learners’ accuracy in writing.