The Effects Of Task Complexity On Accuracy And Complexity In English Letter Writing Of Senior High School Students

The relationship between task complexity and second language performance has been the main focus in recent years.Gaining insights into the effects of task complexity on writing performance can help teachers and test writers to select and design tasks to improve students’ writing.Based on Cognition Hypothesis,this study aims to explore the effects of task complexity manipulated along resourcedirecting dimension(+/-elements)and resource-dispersing dimension(+/-planning time)on English letter writings of senior high school students by employing writing tasks and interview.The participants in this study were 220 grade one students from four natural classes of Liangtang No.1 Senior High School in Nanchang County.The four classes of participants had to complete four writing tasks with different complexity.The two variables of the experiment were the number of elements in resourcedirecting dimension and planning time in resource-dispersing dimension.The four writing tasks were as follows: three elements and no pre-task planning time;three elements and ten minutes of pre-task planning time;six elements and no pre-task planning time;six elements and ten minutes of pre-task planning time.Collected writings were converted into text documents.L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)was employed to calculate syntactic complexity and the number of Tunits and Lexical Complexity Analyzer(LCA)to calculate lexical complexity.The data were entered into SPSS 22.0 for statistical analysis.Four students selected from each class took part in the interview,half of them were at high writing proficiency level and half were at low writing proficiency level.The interview was conducted immediately after the writing tasks were completed.The following findings were drawn from the experiment:(1)under noplanning-time condition,increasing the number of elements led to significant effects on lexical complexity.No significant effects were found in accuracy and syntactic complexity.(2)Under planning condition,increasing the number of elements generated significant effects on accuracy,syntactic complexity and lexical complexity.(3)Under fewer elements condition,pre-task planning time had significant effects on lexical complexity.No significant effects were found on accuracy and syntactic complexity.(4)Under more elements condition,pre-task planning time had significant effect on accuracy.No significant effects were found on syntactic complexity and lexical complexity.According to the interview results,the writing focus,perception of the difficulty of the writing task,behaviors in pretask planning time and views on pre-task planning time would change with the manipulation of task complexity,which affected the accuracy and complexity in letter writing.The findings of this study partly give support to Cognition Hypothesis and provide references for English teachers to select and design writing tasks in future teaching practice.