Task-Based Approach (TBA) to teaching foreign languages has not been applied to true-beginning language students. This study explores the effects of TBA and varying de-grees of task-complexity on the effectiveness of true-beginning Chinese students’ oral lan-guage learning abilities. I aim to improve student motivation and verbal learning outcomes for beginning students though different degrees of task complexity. Direct experimentation was conducted on 20 American college-students with non-Chinese background enrolled in true-beginning Chinese courses: 10 students belonged to the control group, taught by a sepa-rate teacher using simple tasks as pedagogy, while the other 10 underwent the experimental teaching method, which lasted 15 weeks and a total of 45 hours. Evaluations were con-ducted during the seventh and last week of classes to measure progress. The overall conclu-sion is that highly complex tasks do indeed improve oral languages skills of true-beginning Chinese students. Three other important insights can be obtained from the relationship be-tween oral language skills and complex student tasks: 1) complex tasks demonstrably elevate students’ language accuracy rate, abilities to interact and overall oral expression performance; 2) students’ learning performance can be further improved by dividing highly complex teaching tasks into separate group assignments or Group Work; 3) since highly complex tasks improved students’ language abilities, they are, consequently, more motivated and eager to continue learning Chinese. Moreover, the results confirm that TBA and highly complex tasks can be effectively applied to true-beginning Chinese classes.
