The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of task complexity on the quality of L2 learners’ argumentative writing using both global measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) and task-specific measures, namely, for conjunctions. A group of 110 Korean high school students in South Korea performed either a simple or complex argumentative writing task. Task complexity was manipulated by +/–reasoning demands and +/–few elements. A set of 110 argumentative essays were analyzed on 6 global measures of CAF and 2 task-specific measures. The results showed that task complexity affected the fluency of the argumentative writings, in that the complex task group produced more fluent writings than the simple group. However, task complexity did not affect accuracy or syntactic complexity of the argumentative writings. In the task-specific measures, task complexity affected neither frequency nor target-like use of conjunctions. These results have pedagogical implications for task design to help learners develop their L2 proficiency.

1. INTRODUCTION
 2. LITERATURE REVIEW
  2.1. Cognition Hypothesis
  2.2. The Limited Attentional Capacity Model
  2.3. Task Complexity in Written Production
  2.4. Using Task-Specific Measure
 3. METHODOLOGY
  3.1. Participants
  3.2. Tasks
  3.3. Procedures
  3.4. Measures
  3.5. Analyses
 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
  4.1. Global Measures
  4.2. Specific Measures
 5. CONCLUSION
 REFERENCES

• Hyejin Cho(Sookmyung Women’s University)