A Study Of The Effects Of Task Complexity On Accuracy And Overall Quality In Chinese EFL Learners' Writing And Revision

It has now been widely acknowledged that both accuracy and overall quality should be highly emphasized in second and foreign language teaching and learning.The domain of task complexity in second language writing is now witnessing strong interests in investigating the effects of task complexity on students' performance.Much literature has been devoted to the influence of task complexity on complexity,accuracy and fluency in writing while the research on overall quality and both grammatical and lexical accuracy in writing and revision remains a fertile but unexplored field.Under the framework of Cognitive Hypothesis and Trade-off Hypothesis,the present study explores the effects of task complexity on accuracy(both grammatical and lexical accuracy)and overall quality(both holistic and analytical qualities)in Chinese EFL learners'(twenty high school students and twenty college students)writing and revision with three kinds of measurements:holistic scoring,analytical scoring and objective measures of accuracy.Tasks of different complexity were chosen from the tasks used in Skehan and Foster's studies which were applied in many other researchers' studies in this domain.All the quantitative data were processed by SPSS 22.0.The findings of the study demonstrate that task complexity does exert considerable influence on accuracy(both grammatical and lexical)and overall quality(both holistic and analytic)in both writing and revision.To be specific,for low proficiency group,task complexity negatively correlates to the holistic scores in writing while for high proficiency group,the more complex the task is,the better holistic scores students get in writing;by analytic scoring,for low proficiency group,the findings indicate that task complexity negatively correlates to language use and content significantly,while for high proficiency group,task complexity correlates to vocabulary and organization positively and content negatively;by objective measures of accuracy,for low proficiency group,task complexity negatively correlates to EFT/T and LA index and positively correlates to LE/LW.Again,for high proficiency group,task complexity positively correlates to grammatical accuracy by WEFT/TW and lexical accuracy by LE/LW.With regard to the results of revised drafts,for low proficiency group,there is no significant correlation relationship between revised drafts of both writing tasks while for high proficiency group,the more complex the task is,the better holistic scores students get in revision;by analytic scoring,for low proficiency group,task complexity positively correlates to vocabulary and organization.However,for high proficiency group,task complexity positively correlates to mechanics,language use and organization and negatively correlates to content;by objective measures of accuracy,the results show that for low proficiency group,task complexity positively correlates to three measures of accuracy(EFT/T,WEFT/TW,LE/LW)and negatively correlates to one measures of accuracy(LA index),while for high proficiency group,task complexity positively correlates to WEFT/TW and LE/LW.Finally,together with suggestions for future studies,limitations and implications of the present study are discussed.