Generic Features of Tasks and L2 Learners' Oral Performance

Task-based language teaching is one of the burgeoning areas of research in the field of second language acquisition. Over the past two decades, many studies have been conducted to investigate different aspects of TBLT and their effects on language learners' learning as well as task performance(Ellis, 2003, 2005; Skehan and Foster, 1999; Robinson, 2007). A review of the studies conducted on tasks reveled that there is a gap in the literature on the effects of generic features of tasks and their possible effects on learners' performance and it is one of the rarely explored areas of research in TBLT.Therefore, the present study was an attempt to investigate the ways in which generic features of tasks can influence language learners' task performance in terms of three linguistic domains of accuracy, fluency, and complexity. The findings can be helpful for second language acquisition researchers, task and syllabus designers, and language teachers.