The Influence Of Writing Complexity And Difficulty On Students' Performance Accuracy In TBLA

Due to the influence of communicative approach, the present method of English teaching considers cultivating students'communicative ability as the first goal, putting emphasis on the fluency of language production in both research and teaching. However, the students, while increasing their fluency often still show low language accuracy. Combining the advantages of traditional method and the communicative approach, task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-based language assessment (TBLA) are receiving more and more attention. However writing, as one type of language production, is often neglected in the task-based language teaching.To better implement TBLT and TBLA, accelerate the rationalization of the writing testing standard and effectively improve students'writing ability, based on Schehan's assumptions and the model of task complexity and task difficulty put forward by Robinson (2001), this study investigates the influence of task complexity and difficulty on students'writing performance accuracy. The three research questions are: the influence of task complexity on students'performance accuracy; the influence of task difficulty on students'performance accuracy; the relationship between task complexity and students'perception of task difficulty. The study is conducted with a sample of 30 sophomore English majors from Shandong Economic University.Each of them was required to finish three tasks: personal task, topic task and summary task. They were required to answer a short questionnaire following each task. The data about task complexity, task difficulty and students'performance was analyzed using SPSS 11.5 and the results are as follows: task complexity has effects on students'performance accuracy; task difficulty has effects on students'performance accuracy; students'ratings of task difficulty are related to task complexity. Based on the above research results, this study elicits the enlightenment for designing task-based language teaching outlines, implementing task-based language teaching in the class and task-based language assessment: the outline designer should choose tasks of appropriate complexity according to the students'present level, increasing the cognitive load step by step; during the writing teaching process in the classroom, the teacher should pay attention to the effects that the task complexity has on the students, so as to balance the development of accuracy, fluency and complexity; and the influence of task complexity on students'affects should also be considered.