A Study On Aptitude And Task Complexity In Written Narrative Task Performance By Chinese EFL Learners

Language learning aptitude as one of the factors which are much influential tolanguage acquisition achievement has received more and more attention in secondlanguage acquisition. In the meantime, task complexity has also been much exploredin task-based research. However, few studies have addressed the issue of how thedifferent components of language aptitude relate to second language production ontasks of differing cognitive complexity. The present study investigated the relationshipbetween components of aptitude and the syntactic complexity and accuracy ofperformance in two written narrative tasks with difference cognitive load. It alsostudied how written narrative performance varies in tasks of different cognitivecomplexity. Participants involved were Chinese English as Foreign Language learnerswith proficiency level of lower intermediate and they were required to finish oneforeign language aptitude test and two written narrative tasks. General andtask-specific measures are used to weigh up students' performance. Our findingsindicate a complex interaction between aptitude components and task performanceunder different conditions. The components of aptitude that seemed to be related tothe syntactic complexity and accuracy of production were phonological sensitivityand rote learning ability. The results also show that tasks with more cognitive demandtended to produce more relative clauses, which supported Robinson's CognitionHypothesis to some degree. The findings of the present study provide some empiricalsupport for the Cognition Hypothesis and shed some new light on pedagogical designof Task-based language teaching.