Ágnes Albert (Department of English Applied Linguistics) received the Faculty Excellence Publication Award for her study on how the characteristics of language tasks affect the anxiety of native English speakers and English learners when completing written tasks.
Despite growing interest in task-based language teaching (TBLT), limited empirical work has examined how different rhetorical task types influence second language (L2) writing development, especially in relation to affective variables, such as writing anxiety. Existing research in TBLT has largely focused on cognitive dimensions, often neglecting individual differences in learners’ emotional responses. Moreover, Long’s (2014) call to use first language (L1) data as a benchmark in TBLT remains underexplored, complicating the interpretation of L2 performance patterns. To address these gaps, we examined the impact of task type and writing anxiety on the written performance of 140 university students (70 L1 English speakers, 70 L2 English learners) studying as undergraduate students at a university in the United States.Participants completed a writing anxiety questionnaire and performed four rhetorical tasks over four weeks. Essays were assessed using syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) indices. Bayesian linear mixed-effects modeling was used to analyze both linguistic and affective variables.
It was found that while writing anxiety (measured using the SLWAI, Cheng, 2004), did not significantly interact with task type, notable differences emerged between L1 and L2 learners across the three anxiety subscales. The most pronounced difference between the groups was found in somatic anxiety, reflecting physical symptoms. Despite the fact that prior research indicated that cognitive anxiety and avoidance behaviors strongly affect performance (Zabihi et al., 2020), we found no evidence supporting such claims.
Regarding L2 task performance, findings generally support Robinson’s (2003, 2005) Cognition Hypothesis as tasks with greater cognitive demands (from narrative to argumentative) were linked to improved performance in both groups, with some exceptions. For L1 learners, lexical complexity was unexpectedly lowest on the expository task. For L2 learners, lexical complexity did not improve with increased task complexity, and performance sometimes declined, suggesting difficulty in managing cognitive demands: a pattern also noted by Skehan (2014). Significant interactions between task type and learner group were found for syntactic and lexical complexity, accuracy, and fluency, indicating that L1 learners handled higher task demands more effectively, with the largest group differences observed in the argumentative task.
Although we expected anxiety to interact with task complexity and performance, results suggest that proficiency, particularly L1 versus L2 status, played a more decisive role. This underscores the impact of cognitive task complexity and proficiency on learners’ ability to produce linguistically complex texts. The absence of significant interactions between anxiety and task complexity suggests that anxiety may affect performance independently of task demands. Future research could investigate this further using task-specific anxiety measures or qualitative data to better understand how learners experience and manage task-related anxiety.