A Study Of The Effects Of Task Complexity On English Majors’ Writing Performance

In recent years,researchers have paid more attention to the relationship between task complexity and L2 learners’ language output.This field mainly studies the effects of task complexity on fluency,accuracy and complexity of language output.The two main theories related to task complexity are Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis and Skehan & Foster’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model,but they have different views on the effects of task complexity on language output.Meanwhile,the researches in this field mainly focus on the effects of task complexity on spoken language output,while the effects of task complexity on writing is relatively less studied.Therefore,based on Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis,this study explored the effects of task complexity along resource-directing dimension and resource-dispersing dimension on English majors’ writing performance.In this study,60 junior English majors from the Northwest Normal University were selected to participate in this experiment.Through the comprehensive analysis,there is no significant difference in their English writing proficiency of the subjects.The researchers randomly divided them into four groups,each group has 15 participants.Four groups of participants completed writing tasks of different complexity respectively.Task complexity is divided into two dimensions according to the Cognitive Hypothesis.In terms of resource-directing dimension,complexity is measured by adjusting the number of elements that must be involved in the writing task.In terms of resource-dispersing dimension,complexity is measured by whether the preparation time before the task was provided or not.The writing task in the present study is to write a letter for your friend to determine the holiday hotel.The specific task conditions of the four groups are as follows:(1)determine the hotel for vacation which needs to include three elements,with ten minutes of preparation time before writing;(2)determine the hotel for vacation which needs to include three elements,without preparation time before writing;(3)determine the hotel for vacation which needs to include six elements,with ten minutes of preparation time before writing;(4)determine the hotel for the vacation which needs to include six elements,no preparation time before writing.The complexity of writing tasks increases from 3 task elements to 6 task elements,and from having pre-task planning time to no pre-task planning time.After the experiment,the writing texts of the subjects were converted into electronic version,and then the lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,the total number of words and T-unit number of 60 writing texts were calculated by using Lexical Complexity Analyzer and L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer software.Then the data was input into Excel to calculate its fluency and accuracy.Finally,SPSS 24.0 software was used to analyze difference of the fluency,accuracy,lexical complexity and syntactic complexity among the four groups.Through the analysis of experimental results,this study draws the following conclusions: First,the increase of task complexity along the resource-directing dimension,by increasing the number of elements involved in the writing tasks,the writing accuracy and lexical complexity of L2 learners are significantly improved,and the fluency is also improved to some extent,but had a negative effect on syntactic complexity.Second,the increase of task complexity along the resource-dispersing dimension,namely,without pre-task planning time,the results show that the fluency and syntactic complexity of second language learners’ writing decrease significantly,but has little effect on accuracy and lexical complexity.The results of this study validated Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis on the resource-directing dimension and resource-dispersing dimension to some extent,and further enriched the relevant theories of task complexity.At the same time,the study provides practical basis for the design and teaching of English writing tasks.In writing teaching,teachers can control the task complexity of different dimensions to enable learners to achieve the desired writing effect.