Studies have shown that learners' task performance improves when they have the opportunity to repeat the task. Conditions for task repetition vary, however. In the 4/3/2 activity, learners repeat a monologue under increasing time pressure. The purpose is to foster fluency, but it has been suggested in the literature that it also benefits other performance aspects, such as syntactic complexity and accuracy. The present study examines the plausibility of that suggestion. Twenty Vietnamese EFL students were asked to give the same talk three times, with or without increasing time pressure. Fluency was enhanced most markedly in the shrinking‐time condition, but no significant changes regarding complexity or accuracy were attested in that condition. Although the increase in fluency was less pronounced in the constant‐time condition, this increase coincided with modest gains in complexity and accuracy. The learners, especially those in the time‐pressured condition, resorted to a high amount of verbatim duplication from one delivery of their narratives to the next, which explains why relatively few changes were attested in performance aspects other than fluency. The findings suggest that, if teachers wish to implement repeated‐narrative activities in order to enhance output qualities beyond fluency, the 4/3/2 implementation is not the most judicious choice, and opportunities for language adjustment need to be incorporated early in the task sequence.