The Effect Of Task Complexity On The Syntactic Complexity Of EFL Writing

With the constant rise of "task-based" instruction, methods of task-based foreign language teaching gradually become one of the research hotspots. An increasing number of language researchers begin to pay close attention to the effects of the factor of "task" on learners’ language learning, especially to the influence of task complexity on language production. However, recent studies on it focus more on oral aspect, comparatively seldom touching upon writing performance. Thus, a further study on the effect of task complexity on the syntactic complexity of writing may help better guide foreign language teaching.Based on Robinson’s theory about dimensions affecting task complexity (Robinson, 2001a) and referring to study by Chen Huiyuan and Wu Xudong (陈慧媛、吴旭东，1998), the thesis employs three kinds of writing tasks, namely recall writing, free topic writing and summary writing as the writing instruments, with their complexity increasing successively. Adopting Biber et al."s (2011) syntactic complexity indices:object, adverbial and predicative clause in conversational discourse and NP modifiers, passives, adverbial phrases and nominal verb phrases in academic discourse. This thesis attempts to answer the following two research questions.1) To what extent does task complexity affect the use of syntactic complexity indices in conversational discourse, in terms of object, adverbial and predicative clauses? 2) To what extent does task complexity affect the use of syntactic complexity indices in academic discourse, concerning NP modifiers, passives, adverbial phrases and nominal verb phrases?Participants in this research are 64 English major sophomores from a key university of science and engineering in Sichuan Province. Each of them was required to complete three writing tasks with different complexity level in three normal classes within limited time. With the help of Excel and SPSS 16.0, descriptive analysis, one-way ANOVA and multiple comparison were applied to analyze the data. The major findings will be presented as following.Firstly, task complexity does exert a significant influence on the use of object and adverbial clauses, but no difference was found in the production of predicative clauses.1) Students surveyed tended to produce the most object clause in the task with medium complexity (free topic writing task), but the fewest in the most complex one (summary writing task).2) With the complexity of writing task increasing. fewer adverbial clauses were generated, which is explained by Skehan and Foster’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan & Foster,2001).3) For predicative clause, it presents an insignificant frequency among the three writing tasks with different complexity, which may be caused by the far small number of it. The results reveal a implication that students prefer to produce syntactic structures that they are quite familiar with and have been long-trained, such as object clause and adverbial clause.Secondly, task complexity does significantly affect students’ use of NP modifiers and passives but with insignificant differences of the production of adverbial phrases and nominal verb phrases.1). Students surveyed generate the most NP modifiers in the moderately complex task (free topic writing), while the fewest in the easiest one (summary writing).2). The tendency of the highest use of passive forms in free topic writing and the lowest in summary writing is the same as the results shown in object clauses.3). For adverbial phrase and nominal verb phrase, task complexity all exerts no significant effect on the use of them due to their extremely small number of being used, which can nearly be ignored. The results imply that students are not skilled at producing some difficult syntactic patterns like adverbial phrases and nominal verb phrases in their writing.On the basis of the above findings, the present thesis may pedagogically contribute to college English writing teaching programs. First, task complexity can be appropriately enhanced, urging students to devote more attention to processing language forms so as to improve the syntactic complexity of writing language performance. Besides, some certain complex syntactic structures like adverbial phrases and nominal verb phrases should be attached with far more importance in the teaching process. What’s more, owing to the similarity of language structure between English and Chinese, finite clauses are greatly preferred by Chinese students, such as object clause and adverbial clause. Therefore, the ability to generate non-finite clauses also needs to be highly emphasized and frequently trained.