Task complexity and linguistic and discourse features of narrative writing performance Judit Kormos * Lancaster University, Department of Linguistics and English Language, County South, Lancaster, United Kingdom Abstract The research presented in this paper aimed to investigate the linguistic and discourse characteristics of narratives produced by upper-intermediate foreign language learners in a bilingual secondary school. In our analyses we used a variety of linguistic and discourse variables and a recently developed computer tool (Coh-Metrix 2.0: McNamara, Louwerse, Graesser, 2002) to describe the characteristics of narrative texts.As a background for comparison, we also collected data from a small group of L1 writers in order to gain an insight into features of written task performance that is not hindered by difficulties in accessing linguistic knowledge required to execute a task. The variable whether students had to narrate a story with a given content or whether they were free to plan the plot of the story exerted a major impact only on one measure of lexical sophistication and had a minor effect on the overt expression of temporal cohesion. The study showed that the major difference between L1 and foreign language writers could be found with relation to lexical variety, sophistication and range. # 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Narrative; Cohesion; Lexical sophistication; Lexical variety; Syntactic complexity; Task-type Introduction Although oral narratives are frequently researched in the field of second language acquisition, studies on written narratives produced by foreign language learners are scarce despite the fact that this genre is an important one both in language teaching pedagogy and in the assessment of foreign language (FL) competence. Narratives are among the frequently taught written text types in general foreign language courses starting from the beginning level, and they are also included in the curriculum of composition classes for higher level college learners. A large number of high-stakes language proficiency tests also employ narrative tasks to assess FL learners’ writing competence (such as most levels of Cambridge ESOL proficiency exams). Moreover, narrative accounts of events are important in authentic written communication contexts, and narratives can be embedded in other text types, such as supporting evidence in argumentative writing. Another relatively under-researched area in the field of FL writing is the role of task complexity in writing performance. Whereas the effect of task-complexity on oral language production has been in the forefront of investigations in the past twenty years (for a recent summary see Samuda & Bygate, 2008), considerably less research has been conducted on how different task types and the complexity of tasks influence written output produced by FL Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Second Language Writing 20 (2011) 148–161 * Tel.: +44 152493039. E-mail address: j.kormos@lancaster.ac.uk. 1060-3743/$ – see front matter # 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2011.02.001