Johnson Presents at AAAL Conference

Dr. Mark Johnson just returned from Portland, Oregon where he and Mahmoud Abdi Tabari presented the preliminary findings of their research on task complexity and the use of cohesive devices in second language writing at the American Association for Applied Linguistics conference. The paper, titled The Effect of Task Complexity Features on L2 Writers’ Use of Cohesive Devices, looks at how complex features of a writing task impact second language writers’ use of cohesive devices found to predict human ratings of an essay’s organization.

Johnson’s paper, “Formal Genre-Specific Knowledge as a Resource-Dispersing Feature of Task Complexity,” was recently published in a special issue of the journal Languages. The special issue attempts to re-examine task complexity as it is often researched in second language writing. Mark’s paper attempts to situate Tardy’s (2009, 2012) model of genre-specific knowledge within Robinson’s (2011) task complexity framework, arguing that second language writers’ knowledge of a given genre constitutes a form of task complexity that, in turn, impacts the second language writer’s use of language.