EFFECTS OF TASK REPETITION ON L2 ORAL PERFORMANCE
This study departs from the assumption that speaking an L2 is a complex cognitive ability (FORTKAMP, 2000) whose execution seems to involve tradeoff effects among the different goals of speech production, mainly among fluency, accuracy and complexity (BYGATE, 1998, 1999, 2001b; FOSTER e SKEHAN, 1996; SKEHAN e FOSTER, 1995, 2001; SKEHAN, 1998) Bygate (2001b) studied the effects of task familiarity on L2 speech performance. He found that in repeating a narrative task there were gains in terms of complexity of speech and these gains were achieved at the cost of a loss especially in accuracy. The present study investigated whether the results reported in Bygate (2001b) would be similar in the case of a repetition of a picture description task. According to Robinson (2001) a description is less complex than a narrative task. Four measures of speech performance were calculated following Fortkamp (2000) fluency, accuracy, complexity and lexical density. Results indicate gains in complexity and these gains seem to have been paid, especially by gains in accuracy, thus corroborating Bygate s (2001b) findings for this task condition.