The Effects Of Task Complexity And Working Memory On Non-english Majors’ Reading And Writing Performance

English reading and writing are crucial for Chinese students to fulfill their purposes not only in the academic aspect but also in the job market. Considerable research has been conducted to explore the factors which affect the English reading and writing at home and abroad. These factors consist of task factors, interactional factors and learner factors. The present study focuses on the effects of task complexity(task factor) and working memory(learner factor) on the L2 reading and writing.Although working memory(WM) has been a hot issue in the field of cognitive psychology and language teaching, many Chinese English teachers haven’t realized the importance of WM in SLA. Thus, this thesis may arouse Chinese teachers’ attention to significance of WM and WM training. What’s more, task-based research can shed light on how the learners allocate their limited attentional and memory resources in finishing complex tasks, and how task manipulation affects the cognitive processing of L2 reading and writing. Besides, there are few Chinese researchers studying the additive effects of task complexity and WM. Therefore, the present study fills this gap.In the present study, the researcher selects 53 sophomores majoring in Electrical Engineering, from Taiyuan University of Technology as subjects to conduct an empirical study to explore the independent and additive effects of task complexity and WM on L2 reading and writing. In the pilot study, the researcher randomly chose 10 candidates from major of Computer to complete a topic familiarity questionnaire. The purpose of the pilot study was to decided the most familiar and unfamiliar topics.According to the results of questionnaire, the researcher designed the simple and complex reading and writing tasks. And then under the arrangement and supervision of the researcher and the subjects’ English teacher, the subjects successively took part in the WM span test, the topic-familiar writing and reading tests and the topic-unfamiliar writing and reading tests. After the experiments, the researcher collected and organized the original data, and then analyzed the data by the statistical software SPSS 17.0 through the paired-sample t test and correlation analysis. The results are as follows:a. L2 reading comprehensionWhen the subjects complete the topic-familiar and-unfamiliar reading tasks, the mean scores of two-set multiple choices respectively are 2.51 and 2.65, and there is no significant difference between the topic-familiar and-unfamiliar reading performance(P = 0.586 > 0.05). Therefore, the task complexity along topic familiarity dimension may not significantly affect the subjects’ reading comprehension.The correlation coefficient between WM capacity and topic-familiar reading performance is 0.495(P = 0.000 < 0.01), and between WM capacity and topic-unfamiliar reading comprehension is 0.33(P = 0.02 < 0.05). Thus, WM significantly and positively affects the scores of multiple-choice questions in both topic-familiar and-unfamiliar reading tasks.b. L2 writing outputTask complexity significantly affects L2 writing performance in terms of fluency(P = 0.02 < 0.05) and accuracy(P = 0.031 < 0.05). In other words, when subjects complete the topic-unfamiliar writing task, fluency and accuracy are obviously reduced. However, the syntactic complexity and lexical variation are increased,although there is no significant difference in syntactic complexity(P = 0.271 > 0.05)and lexical variation(P = 0.878 > 0.05).There is significant and positive correlations between WM capacity and accuracy in topic-familiar(P =.003 < 0.01) and-unfamiliar(P =.000 < 0.01) writing tasks. Withregard to syntactic complexity, there is no significant impact of WM on it. There is interaction between WM and task complexity with regard to lexical variation and fluency. That is, the WM significantly and positively correlates to lexical variation only in the topic-unfamiliar writing task(r =.286, p =.046 < 0.05), and correlates to fluency only in topic-familiar writing task(r =.412, p =.003 < 0.01).To sum up, the results provide evidence that WM positively affects the L2 reading and writing performance particularly in terms of accuracy. With regard to the task complexity, topic familiarity has no significant effect on L2 reading comprehension. Topic familiarity significantly and positively affects the accuracy and fluency, but negatively affects the syntactic complexity and lexical variation, which partially support Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis and Skehan’s Limited Attentinal Capacity Model. Hopefully, the present study could provide inspirations with English teachers and textbook designers, and have some empirical significance for future research.