The Effects Of Task Complexity Along Resource-directing Dimension On Non-english Majors’ Writing Performance

The relationship between task complexity and the quality of L2 output has attracted much attention from L2 researchers.Cognition Hypothesis Model based on previous studies divides task complexity into resource-directing dimension and resource-dispersing dimension and holds that increasing task complexity along the resource-directing dimension can improve the quality of learners’ language output.In recent years,the related studies of task complexity mainly have focused on the effects of task complexity on the quality of oral English output.The research on effects of task complexity on English writing performance has relatively small.The study is based on Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis Model,taking few elements as a variable and explores the effects of task complexity on EFL learners’writing performance from resource-directing dimension.In this study,92 sophomores in a certain university were selected as the subjects.They were divided into the high-level group and the low-level group,46 students in each group.The number of people in the high-level group and low-level group who completed the low complexity task was equal to the number in the high complexity task.Low complexity task needs to meet three writing requirements,while high complexity task needs to meet six writing requirements.The writing performance of the subjects was measured from three aspects: complexity(syntactic complexity and lexical complexity),accuracy and fluency.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the effects of task complexity along resource-directing dimension on EFL learners’ writing performance?(2)What are the effects of task complexity on EFL learners’ writing performance with different English proficiency levels?The findings are as follows:(1)In general,task complexity had an impact on the writing performance of EFL learners.As the number of elements increased,the students’ writing performance improved on the whole.In terms of the complexity of written text,with the increase of task complexity,the syntactic complexity decreased,while the lexical complexity increased significantly.In terms of accuracy,the increase of task complexity would reduce the accuracy of the written text to some extent.In terms of fluency,writing fluency improved significantly as the number of elements increased.In short,with the increase of task complexity,the lexical complexity and fluency of students’ English writing significantly increased,while the syntactic complexity and writing accuracy reduced to some extent.(2)Task complexity had different effects on the writing performance of learners at different L2 levels.For high-level students,with the increase of task complexity,the lexical complexity and fluency of written text increased,but the syntactic complexity and accuracy decreased;for low-level students,with the increase of task complexity,the fluency,syntactic complexity and lexical complexity of written text improved,but the accuracy decreased.Writing performance is one of the important indicators to measure the quality of language output.This study explores the influence of writing task complexity on the writing performance of EFL learners.The results of this study provide some references for college English teaching,especially for the design of writing tasks.