Understanding the Complex Relationships
摘要
This chapter reports the quantitative findings of the study reported in the book on the relationships among strategic competence, task complexity, and speaking performance in computer-delivered multimodal speaking tasks. It presents the results concerning learners’ reported use of metacognitive strategies, perceived task complexity, and oral scores across the four TOEFL iBT integrated speaking tasks. The findings show variation across tasks, with task complexity significantly affecting speaking performance. They also indicate that metacognitive strategies had no direct effect on oral scores, although monitoring moderated the negative effect of task complexity on performance. The chapter thus offers statistical evidence for the complex relationships among the three research variables.