The Influence Of The Task Complexity And Difficulty On EFL Writing From The Perspective Of Meaning Negotiation

Since the1970’s, a lot of studies has done on college English writing in China by scholars are the “productapproach” and “process approach”. With the development in the psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, we beginto realize the limitation of these two approaches. In recent years, since being universally involved in processapproach, meaning negotiation has gained increasing observation from researchers and has adopted into thestudies of writing. Therefore, there has a profound significance of analyzing the effects of task variables onwriting under the perspective of meaning negotiation.Based on the model of task complexity and difficulty proposed by Robinson (2001a), this study investigatethe influence of task complexity and difficulty on student’s EFL writing and intended to examine the followingtwo questions:(1) Does task complexity influence learner’s writing complexity, accuracy and fluency frommeaning negotiation perspective?(2) Are task difficulty and learner’s writing complexity, accuracy and fluencycorrelated from meaning negotiation perspective?60participants from junior major in English in Zhixing College of Northwest Normal University. Which arechosen base on their writing performance, then these participants are divided randomly into three groups. Afterthe pretest, the author give these subjects ten weeks’ training about the meaning negotiation, mainly introducethe model and strategies of negotiation meaning; then have a test for experiment instrument. At last, one group isrequired to complete one kind of writing tasks after the training of meaning negotiation. The three writing tasksare: personal task, topic task and summary task.By means of qualitative and quantitative research, the results show that①increasing the cognitivecomplexity and difficulty of tasks along+/-prior knowledge dimensions, production’s complexity and fluency issignificantly lower in–prior knowledge dimension than in+prior knowledge dimension. task complexity alsohas great influences on the accuracy of the writing production, when the learners complete the personal task(task1), they employ clear and correct words and sentences. As for the summary task (task3), students havefinished the reading material or make some changes in the sentences copied from the original material, so themistakes can be greatly reduced. It is clear that both task1and task3have higher percentage of correct verbforms than task2.②Task difficulty and learner’s writing production are partly correlated, the more difficulty thelearners perceive the task, the more stress the learners feel, the more interest the learner has in the task and themore motivation for wanting to do more similar task, the less complexity, accuracy and fluency their productionare. The experimental results show that: on the one hand, the influence of writing tasks on linguistic complexity and accuracy are not compatible with the Robinson’s assumption, while this kind of situation partly support toSkehan&Foster’s Limited Attentional Capacity model; on the other hand, there are no competition pools amonglinguistic complexity, accuracy and accuracy for there is not a trade-off effect between them. This situation isnearly accordant with Robinson’s Hypothesis.Encourage students to negotiate and cooperate in writing, which can develop the students’ comprehensiveability of using language. Therefore, some valuable implications drawn from the results and shed light on someconstructive measures for writing tasks from the perspective of meaning negotiation. These measures compriseselecting appropriate tasks, which can arouse student’s interest and motivation; and regulating the time toimprove student’s awareness of reasonable attention allocation, which making they keep their attentions both onthe processing of the content and linguistics’ complexity and accuracy.