The Influence Of Task Complexity On Writing Performance: Investigating Variation Of Discourse Markers, Syntactic Complexity And Accuracy In EFL Writing

Since the 1980's, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has been developing and become a foreign language teaching approach which is well acknowledged by applied linguists and foreign language teachers. Previous researches indicate that how the task variables exert influences on the learners'language output should be firstly worked out in order to implement tasks in the actual classroom to achieve certain pedagogical goal. As writing is a kind of language output, it is unavoidably influenced by task variables.Based on the model of task complexity and task difficulty proposed by Robinson (2001), this study investigates the influence of task complexity on students'EFL writing performances, with four questions being its focus:whether task complexity has effect on their use of discourse markers (DMs), whether it has influence on syntactic complexity, whether it has effect on syntactic accuracy and what are the differences between students of Science and Technology (SST) and students of Arts (SA) in their writing performance.Subjects in this study are 60 non-English majors from a university in Sichuan Province. Among them,30 are sophomores of Science and Technology (SST) and the other 30 are sophomores of Arts (SA). They are required to complete three writing tasks of the same topic but with different degree of task complexity. The three tasks are:personal task, topic task and summary task. Data collected have undergone some treatments of Excel and SPSS 16.0 and the major findings are as follows:1) The increase in task complexity makes no significant difference to DMs Variation in the students'writing performance. DMs that EFL learners use most frequently are: enumeration DMs, Contrastive DMs, Additive DMs, Consequences DMs and Exemplification DMs, respectively; Similar DMs, Selective DMs and Causal DMs are the least used DMs in their writings.2) Task complexity influences syntactic complexity with respect to the number of sentences and T-units in writing. The less complex the task is, the more syntactically complex the writing output is.3) Task complexity also has influence on syntactic accuracy. Topic writing witnesses the smallest number of error-free sentences; personal task comes second and summary writing is of the greatest accuracy. As for errors writers make, students are prone to make more lexicon-application errors in personal and topic task and they tend to make more errors like spelling, punctuation and capitalization etc. in summary task.4) There is no significant difference found between SST and SA in DM variation The only small difference is that in each task, SST use a little more DMs than SA do; SST writings are more syntactically complex than those of SA; SST make subtly fewer basic grammar errors (El) but more lexicon-application errors (E2) and other errors such as spelling, punctuation and capitalization etc. (E3) than SA. SST make more E2 than SA do whether in personal task, topic task or summary task. It is hoped that the study may be of some help and inspiration to EFL teaching, especially in EFL writing, and that it may have some empirical significance in the development of applied linguistics.