The Effect Of Task Type, Task Complexity And Time Pressure On Verb Patterns In EFL Writing Of Chinese English Majors

With the deepening of the research area of second language acquisition and the flourishing of language teaching, as the focus of cultivating language skills and also an important link in communication, language production, is becoming the concern of more and more researchers both in the field of linguistics and language teaching. Especially with the development of task-based instruction, many researchers put their research interests in the field combining task and language production, attempting to explore the effect of task on the performance in language production based on task itself in order to achieve the purpose of improving the quality of language production and the language proficiency as well by manipulating tasks. As one of the major aspects in language production, there are many studies on tasks and oral production being carried out with a shortage of researches on tasks and writing production.In view of this, the paper is based on second language wiring production, taking complexity and accuracy as two dimensions measuring verb patterns. The subjects in the study are selected from freshmen majoring in Business English of Wuhan Commercial and Service College and are divided into two groups. It analyzes the performance of the two groups on complexity and accuracy of verb patterns in the writing production of three tasks: personal task, argumentation task and narrative task, under the conditions of with time limit and without time limit respectively.It drawn some conclusions that:1).Task types have significant effect on complexity and accuracy of verb patterns;2).Task complexity significantly effect on complexity and accuracy of verb patterns, the more complex the task is, the higher complexity and lower accuracy of verb patterns is;3). Time pressure has effect only on narrative task and doesn’t significantly effect on personal task and argumentation task.4). There is no correlation between complexity and accuracy of verb patterns in none of these tasks.In the end, the paper carries out some implication on task design and teaching in task-based writing for the designers and teachers.