Abstract
Critical thinking is an essential 21st Century skill (Kusumi & Michita, 2015). In this research, the effects of task difficulty and language on written persuasiveness are examined. Thirty Chinese learners of Japanese were asked to write four opinion tasks varying the language used (Chinese and Japanese) and the task-difficulty (daily-life and specialist themes), and the persuasiveness (% of reason and evidence statements; Manalo et al.,2015) analyzed. The results showed that the simple tasks completed in Chinese were more persuasive than difficult tasks written in Japanese. These results will be discussed with reference to tasks in language teaching.
