The Research On Influence Of Task Types On Linguistic Complexity In English Majors’ Writing

Complexity, accuracy and fluency are the important dimensions to measure L2performance and also the goals of English learners. For decades, many foreign anddomestic scholars have made a lot of studying works on the three dimensions and haveobtained a number of important achievements. However complexity is not given equalattention as the other two aspects; many scholars have been putting more emphasis onfluency and accuracy in both theoretical and practical aspects. In recent years, though somescholars are realizing the importance of complexity, the empirical studies on syntacticcomplexity are considerably limited compared to lexical complexity. In order to solve theproblems of how to implement tasks in writing classroom and how to employ tasks toachieve certain pedagogical goal, the influences of the task types on the linguisticcomplexity should be found out. So it’s very important to study the influences of differenttask types on lexical and syntactic complexity on the learners’ written production.Based on the above-mentioned situations, the thesis investigates the lexicalcomplexity and syntactic complexity in written composition by the English major’sstudents across three task types—Personal Descriptive Task, Expository Task andArgument Task. The subjects were the English major’s students from independentinstitution and university. The measures of lexical and syntactic complexity includestandard type–token ratio, content words/words, words per T-unit, clauses per T-unit andtype of subordination.The three research questions are:1. Do the types of task have different affects on student’s lexical complexity?2. Do the types of task have different affects on student’s syntactical complexity?3. Whether the independent institute students and college students under the same tasktype have difference on lexical complexity and syntactical complexity and whether theyhave the same changing tendency?The results show that task types significantly affect students’ syntactic complexity onthe indices of words per T-unit, clauses per T-unit and type of subordination. In terms ofsyntactic complexity, expository task and argument task elicits significantly more complexlanguage structure and longer sentence than personal descriptive task. It is no significanteffects on lexical complexity by the indices of lexical density and lexical variation. Comparison between independent college and university confirms that university studentstend to have more lexical variation and lexical density than independent institution students.There are statistical significant differences on lexical complexity between independentinstitution and university; while no significant differences on syntactic complexity betweenthem.