The impact of task structure on the use of vague expressions by EFL learners

Abstract

The present study sets out to examine whether and how task structure affects the number and type of vague expressions used by a group of higher intermediate EFL learners. The participants were 50 Iranian EFL learners from 6 intact classes, all native speakers of Persian with limited opportunity to communicate with native speakers of English, and no experience in English-speaking countries. To elicit data, two picture description tasks were used. These picture-stories possessed the defining characteristics of structured and unstructured narrative tasks, respectively. Results revealed that (a) unstructured tasks were associated with the production of significantly more vague expressions and (b) the most notable differences between performances on the two task types concerned ‘vague nouns’, ‘vague quantifiers’, ‘vague deintensifiers’ and ‘vague subjectivisers’. The results of the study have implications for both teachers and teacher educators in that they may help identify the kinds of tasks which induce language learners to use vague expressions more frequently.