Importance of Task Complexity

Abstract

Although the concept of task and its role has been a matter of much controversy in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), there is a general agreement that in language learning, task complexity is required for the effectiveness of the final performance of tasks, (Robinson, 2011).

This paper is an overview of the task based language teaching, task complexity, its definition and its importance in language education to gain more insights into this area and its effect on second language (L2) development. Robinson (2001, p. 29) defines task complexity as “the result of attentional, memory, reasoning, and other information processing demands imposed by the structure of the task on the language learner.” Our goal is to gain further insights into this area of second language acquisition (SLA) research by understanding how task complexity works and the effects it has on L2 acquisition.