The Effects Of Task Complexity And Task Difficulty On Chinese Non-English Major Learners' English Written Production

Nowadays,with the surge forward task-based instruction and the exploration of the approaches to have a balance between linguistic form and meaning,the research focusing on task itself has become a newly hot point in the field of Second Language Acquisition,which concentrates on studying the effects of task variables on learners' language production,implementing tasks in actual classroom and employing tasks to achieve certain pedagogical goals.However,the premise of applying tasks in class teaching to realize pedagogical expectations is to construct a theoretical framework of task variables and investigate the variables,which is a fertile but still unexplored area.In addition,as for writing,a kind of language production,former researches pay so much attention to argumentation while other writing types are often neglected.Therefore,the present study aims to investigate the effects of tasks of different cognitive complexity on learners' language production hoping that the scope of researches on task can be widened.Based on Skehan's Limited Attentional Capacity Model,Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis of task complexity and task difficulty,and Swain's Output Hypothesis,this paper makes a study with quantitative analysis method to examine the following questions:(1)Can task complexity have effects on non-English major learners' English written production in terms of fluency,accuracy,syntactic complexity and lexical variety?(2)Is task difficulty correlated to learners' English written production?(3)Can task complexity affect learners' ratings of task difficulty? 40 participants are invited in the experiment with 20 in the single task group and 20 in the dual task group.The former is asked to write an English passage based on a series of cartoons,while the latter is given the same pictures but the sequence of the pictures is disorganized.Questionnaire is adopted to investigate the influence of task difficulty and the correlation between task complexity and task difficulty.What's more,the written production is measured in terms of fluency,accuracy,syntactic complexity and lexical variety through the ratio of words per T-unit,error-free clauses per clause,clauses per T-unit and word types per square root of twice the words.After all the procedures have been done,the data are analyzed by SPSS22.0.Major findings emerging from the results of the present research are:(1)Task complexity affects learners' English written production in terms of fluency,accuracy,syntactic complexity and lexical variety.The less complex the task is,the more fluent,accurate and syntactically complex the production is.The more complex the task is,the less fluent,accurate and syntactically complex the production is.However,lexical variety increases when the task complexity is increased.(2)Task difficulty is partly correlated to learners' English written production.The findings suggest that learners' perception of task difficulty and stress are negatively correlated to fluency and accuracy.And fluency and accuracy decrease when learners' confidence in their ability decreases.Learners' perception of task difficulty is negatively correlated to syntactic complexity,but positively correlated to lexical variety.What's more,accuracy decreases with the decrease of learners' motivation to complete tasks.The more difficult the learner feels the task,the more stress and less confidence in their ability the learner has while doing the task,the less fluent,accurate and syntactically complex the written production is;the less difficult the learner feels the task,the less stress and more confidence in their ability the learner has while doing the task,the more fluent,accurate and syntactically complex the language production is.(3)Learners' ratings of task difficulty are affected by task complexity.Task complexity significantly affects learners' ratings of perception of task difficulty,stress,confidence in their ability and motivation.On the basis of above findings,some pedagogical implications for task design and task-based language teaching are drawn.Individual differences should be taken into consideration when teachers are choosing tasks with proper task complexity to make sure students could improve themselves gradually.It is also hoped that the present study may be of some help for future quantitative research on written production.