On the basis of Child's (1987) text typology, this study explores how text types influence cognitive complexity, task difficulty and L2 learner's performance. 15 English-speaking learners of L2 Chinese participated in the study. They were asked to complete two monologue tasks in Chinese. Task One was to produce instructive texts and Task Two evaluative texts. The findings of the study indicate that learners performed better, in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity, when producing instructive texts than evaluative texts. Accuracy and complexity were not significantly influenced by text types, but fluency was found to be significantly associated with text types.