Length Constraint and Second Language Narrative Retelling

Willingness to use tasks in different learning-teaching contexts has been receiving an increasing amount of attention. A great body of literature has dissected the effect of imposing different task conditions on language performance. The present study, being an approximate replication of Behtary and Yaghoubi-Notash (2009), has illuminated a part of this picture by investigating whether imposing the length constraint had effects on learners¿ complexity, accuracy, lexis, and fluency (CALF) of narrative retelling tasks. CALF indexes were all calculated using the measurements according to Tavakoli (2018) to observe the changes in different aspects of language performance. The participants of this study were 23 junior ELT students who were asked to perform a narrative retelling task in two different conditions as length constrain was imposed in the second one. Findings of this study revealed that imposing the length constraint affected EFL learners¿ narrative retellings in terms of a linear combination of CALF indexes. It also had a remarkable positive effect on accuracy and fluency indexes but no effect on lexis and complexity of reproductions.