The Effects Of Manipulating Task Complexity Along±here-and-now Dinenion On Chinese College Learners’ Writing

This paper aims to examine the effect of task complexity manipulated along±here-and-now dimension on college learners’narrative writing in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity.Freshmen from Shihezi University were chosen as subjects to undertake the experiment. Two experimental groups were involved in this study, group here-and-now and group there-and-then. A pretest was performed to guarantee that all subjects had an equivalent writing proficiency. Subjects in both groups had the same time to plan and finish their compositions. However, the subjects in the here-and-now condition could view the pictures during the writing process, and they were required to write in the present tense. In the there-and-then condition, pictures were collected before writing, so the subjects had to write in the past tense. Subjects in the there-and-then condition are imposed on a higher cognitive load than those in the here-and-now condition. The researcher adopted words per T-unit and the ratio of error-free clauses to analyze fluency and accuracy respectively. The clauses per T-unit and word types per square root of two times the words to measure syntactic and lexical complexity. The data collected were analyzed by SPSS11.5. The result shows that accuracy and lexical complexity are rising with the increase of task complexity.The result lends much support to Robinson’s Hypothesis, for there is not a trade-off effect between accuracy and lexical complexity. Teachers and syllabus designers should take a consideration of the effect of cognitive load on learners so as to select and design materials to promote the development of Second Language Acquisition.