A Study On The Effects Of Task Complexity On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Performance

The complexity of tasks affects the quality of second language learners’ language output.Based on Limited Attentional Capacity Model and Cognitive Hypothesis,this study aims to explore the influence of task complexity on the complexity,accuracy and fluency of senior high school students’ English writing performance,and answer the following research questions: 1.What are the effects of changing task complexity along the resource-directing dimension on students’ writing performance regarding complexity,accuracy and fluency? 2.What are the effects of changing task complexity along the resource-dispersing dimension on students’ writing performance regarding complexity,accuracy and fluency? 3.What are the effects of changing task complexity along the two dimensions on students’ writing performance regarding complexity,accuracy and fluency?The research adopts the method of combining English writing experiment and questionnaire survey,analyzing the writing texts of 120 students with the same theme but different task complexity.The results show that increasing task complexity in terms of the resource-directing dimension(+elements)has significant positive impacts on fluency and lexical complexity,but little on accuracy and syntactic complexity;Providing planning time in the dimension of resource-dispersing promotes students to perform better in fluency and syntactic complexity,but no significant differences can be observed in accuracy and lexical complexity;Increasing the number of elements and providing planning time at the same time can produce synergistic function,which improves fluency,accuracy and lexical complexity.The results of this study has some implications for English writing teaching in senior high schools.Teachers should adjust the complexity of writing tasks according to specific goals so that students can make full use of attention resources and improve their writing performance.