The Effects Of Increasing Task Complexity On Chinese College EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writing Production

Since the1980s,“task” has beenthe focus of English language teaching and research.In the past few years, more and more researchers have begun to study the effects of taskvariables on learners’ language production from the cognitive perspectives. Robinson(2001a) argued, the research should be centered on the effects of task complexity onlearners’ language production in order to design and sequence task appropriately. However,it is found that the studies regarding the impacts of task complexity on learners’ languageproduction are mostly related to oral production. As an important language production,written production has not been given due attention. Therefore, the present research aimsat investigating the effects of task complexity on learners’ written production, especiallyargumentative writing, which is commonly seen and used to test learners’ languageproficiency.Skehan and Robinson made different predictions with respect to the effects ofincreasing task complexity on learners’ language production. According to Skehan,learners cannot attend to form (accuracy and complexity) and meaning (fluency)simultaneously because of human being’ limited attentional resources. When taskcomplexity increases, the cognitive resources needed to complete the task also increases,which leads to the degraded fluency, accuracy and complexity. While Robinson classifiedtask complexity into two dimensions: resource-directing dimension andresource-dispersing dimension. Increasing task complexity along resource-directingdimension will trigger greater accuracy and linguistic complexity in order to meet thehigher functional demands they put on learners. These two different predictions becomethe starting point of the present study.Based on the Triadic Componential Framework proposed by Robinson (2001a), thethesis attempts to examine the effects of increasing task complexity on Chinese collegeEFL learners’ argumentative written production. The main research ques tion is that:What’s the effect of increasing task complexity (simple task VS complextask) on Chinesecollege English learners’ argumentative written production in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity? The thirty-one non-English major sophomore subjects are from QimingCollege of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Every student is required towrite two argumentative writing tasks with the title being given and task complexity beingmanipulated. The collected compositions were analyzed by AntConc and SPSS. Theresults revealed that the fluency, accuracy and syntactic complexity reduced as the taskcomplexity increased, while the lexical variety enhanced which was an exception.Based on the findings, some pedagogical implications for task design and task-basedinstruction are drawn. It is hoped that the present study may be of some help for the futurequantitative written production research.