In this study, I explored the interactions among genre, task complexity, and L2 proficiency in learners' writing task performance. Specifically, after identifying the lack of valid operationalizations of genre and task dimensions in L2 writing research, I examined how genre functions as a task complexity variable, and how learners' perceptions and language production interact with their proficiency. In exploring ESL students' perceptions and production of different writing tasks, I used the two genres of narrative and argumentative writing, within which I manipulated the level of task complexity operationalized as idea support (e.g., narrative task with supporting ideas is the simple narrative task). I collected essay data from 76 ESL students. Each student wrote four essays (i.e., a total of 304 essays). Immediately after each writing session, the students showed their perceptions of a task in terms of six dimensions (task complexity, difficulty, anxiety, confidence, interest, and motivation). Additionally, I collected perception data from 30 ESL instructors with regard to how their students at a proficiency level similar to that of the student participants would perform the target writing tasks. In so doing, I could compare students' perceptions with teachers' expectations of how the tasks would function.From the task perception result, I found a gap between the student and teacher groups regarding their views of the two genres. Specifically, the teachers predicted that ESL students would have greater difficulty in completing the argumentative genre than the narrative, but instead the students perceived both genres as involving a similar level of complexity and difficulty. Also, unlike teachers' expectations, students consistently judged the tasks with idea support as less complex and less difficult. One common result from both groups was their judgments of the narrative genre as sparking greater interest and motivation for further writing than the argumentative. The writing result showed that the students' language varied to a greater extent across the two genres but not across the idea support conditions. I also found that most linguistic features did not differ by L2 proficiency. This result suggests that there is a very weak link between writers' task perceptions and language production, challenging the common practice of task-based writing research. Therefore, this result points to the importance of exploring these two different result types separately in written discourse because writers' language changes are largely motivated by varying communicative functions of different genres but not by a task's cognitive constraints imposed on writers. The result of essay quality scores demonstrated that narrative essays tended to receive higher scores than argumentative essays in terms of discourse-level categories, and that there were significant interaction effects between genre and idea support. Specifically, argumentative essays composed with supporting ideas resulted in higher scores, whereas narrative essays with supporting ideas led to lower scores. Unlike the result of linguistic features, with L2 proficiency as an additional variable, the result showed that higher proficiency ESL students are likely to receive higher scores on sentence-level categories. This study offers implications for L2 writing research, pedagogy, and assessment. Particularly, L2 writing instructors and task developers will be informed about the possibility of constructing independent writing tasks with various genres and task complexity levels to achieve an appropriate alignment of task features with target L2 learners.
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