The Effects Of Task Complexity On Chinese College Non-English Majors’ Writing

Since the1980’s, the main concern of task-based language teaching has been the effects of task design and implementation variables on language production in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity. However, previous researches indicate that the main factor which affects language performance is the choice of task itself. Thus, how task variables produce impacts on the learners’language performance should be firstly worked out so as to implement tasks in the actual classroom to achieve certain pedagogical goal. Being a kind of receptive and productive skill, writing is unavoidably influenced by task variables. By means of quantitative research, on the basis of Skehan and Foster’s Limited Capacity Model and Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis, the present thesis attempts to investigate the effects of task complexity represented by three writing tasks on Chinese college non-English majors’writing performance in terms of accuracy, complexity and fluency. The present research consists of three parts:pilot study, homogeneity test and main experiment. The pilot study was first carried out to guarantee the feasibility of the researching materials and research design. Then the homogeneity test was conducted to make sure that all the subjects participated in the main experiment should be equivalent in their English writing proficiency in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity. The subjects participated in the homogeneity test were105full-time non-English sophomores who came from three intact classes in the Northwest Normal University.98subjects were chosen after the homogeneity test to ensure that they are at the same proficiency level in terms of writing. Then the three intact classes were randomly divided into three experimental groups and each group was respectively assigned with one of the three tasks:personal task, picture writing task and decision-making task. The complexity of the three writing tasks was analyzed on the basis of Skehan’s model and Robinson’s model. The personal task is of the lowest cognitive complexity, picture writing task in the middle, and decision-making task the highest. After the experiment, the researcher adopted words per T-unit to measure fluency, the ratio of error-free clauses to analyze accuracy, the clause per T-unit and word types per square root of two times the words to measure syntactic and lexical complexity respectively. Then the data were collected and analyzed with the help of SPSS11.5by using One-way ANOVA. The results indicate that (1) task complexity exerts a significant influence on accuracy; the more complex tasks produce less accurate language performance;(2) task complexity also exerts a significant influence on lexical complexity; the more complex tasks produce more lexically complex language performance; however task complexity has no significant impact on syntactic complexity;(3) task complexity has no significant impact on fluency. The results illustrate that L2learners have a limited attentional resource and can not prioritize equally the three dimensions (fluency, accuracy and complexity) of language production. Learners’attentional resources will firstly be allotted to meaning, then to form, so the competition will occur between accuracy and complexity. Thus, the results can lend a support to Skehan and Foster’s Limited Processing Capacity, for there is a trade-off effect between accuracy and lexical complexity. The findings of the present study may lend some insights to teachers and syllabus designers. The results may help them select writing materials of appropriate complexity and design task-based syllabus that based on the cognitive loads imposed on learners so as to improve interlanguage development.