The Effects Of Task Complexity On Chinese EFL Learners' Argumentative Writing Performance

This study is based on the theoretical framework of Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis.Experiments are designed for the purpose of quantitative analysis to study the effects of task complexity on argumentative writing performance of Chinese college EFL learners in the two dimensions of resource directing and resource dispersing.Specific research questions are put forward as followed: What are the effects of increasing task complexity along,respectively,source-directing and sour-dispersing dimensions on the accuracy,fluency and complexity of the argumentative writing output of Chinese college EFL learners? Is there any interactional effect between these two dimensions?To answer the question,80 sophomores majored in English are invited from 4 classes(20 each)in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies to participate the experiments.No significant difference is noticed by analyzing the class scores of the 80 subjects,indicating a similar English proficiency.The two variables in the experiments are the number of elements and the planning time.Four groups of subjects will receive similar tasks of varying complexity: 15 minutes of planning time and 4 elements;5 minutes of planning time and 4 elements;5 minutes of planning time and 8 elements;15 minutes of planning time and 8 elements.As the planning time decreases and the number of elements increases,the task complexity is increasing.The writing output are converted into electronic documents and fed to well-established software to calculate lexical complexity,syntactic complexity and the number of T-units,which are then processed through SPSS 17.0 for statistical analysis.The research results indicated that:(1)the manipulation of increasing resource-directing variable has a significant positive impact on fluency and syntactic complexity,some negative impact on lexical complexity but no effect on accuracy;(2)the enhancement of resource-dispersing variable complexity has a significant negative impact on fluency and syntactic complexity,but not on accuracy and lexical complexity;(3)there was no significant interactional effect of increased task complexity between the resource-directing dimension and the resource-dispersing dimension on all aspects of English argumentative production.This study partially verifies Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis and can be referred to for task design and teaching practice.