Effects Of Different Task Complexity On Senior Middle School Students' English Argumentative Writing

Since 1980 s,the relationship between task complexity and foreign language learners' linguistic performance has been extensively discussed in second language acquisition research.The discussion focuses on the effects of task complexity on language output in terms of fluency,accuracy and complexity.At present,most research on the effect of task complexity focus on oral language output,while less research has been conducted on English written output.Therefore,this study primarily examine the effects of different task complexity on learners' written performance,which mainly based on the argumentative writing.Main theories about task complexity are the Limited Attentional Capacity Model and the Cognition Hypothesis.In the Cognition Hypothesis,task complexity is divided into two dimensions:resource-directing dimension and resource-dispersing dimension.These two models have made different opinions about the effects of task complexity on language performance.Shehan believes that people's attentional resources are limited,so the fluency,accuracy and complexity can not be noticed at the same time.When the task complexity increases,the fluency,accuracy and complexity of language output will decrease at the same time.While Robinson points out that when task complexity increases along the resource-directing dimension(±here and now,±reasoning demands,±few elements),language function and language itself have higher requirements for guiding attention and memory resources.As a result,the accuracy and complexity of language output will increase with it,but the fluency will reduce.When task complexity increases along the resource-dispersing dimension(±planning time,±prior knowledge,and±single task),it will lead to the decrease of fluency,accuracy and complexity of learners' language output.Because learners' attention does not meet the task needs of specific language systems,instead,it is allocated to the interlanguage system they have established.The two different views of Skehan and Robinson are the starting points of this study.Based on the Triadic Componential Framework proposed by Robinson,this paper attempts to study the effects of different task complexity on senior middle school students' English argumentative written output from both resource directing and resource dispersing dimensions by controlling “±elements,±reasoning demands,±planing time,and ±background knowledge” those four variables.The main research questions are that: What are the effects of different task complexity on senior middle school students' English argumentative written output with regard to the fluency,accuracy and complexity? The subjects ofthis study were 60 senior students from the first middle school of Minxian,they are grade three.Students of each group need to complete a writing according to the specific requirement of the task complexity.Then the researcher calculates and analyzes the collected data through the SPSS.It is found that when task complexity increases,the fluency,accuracy and syntactic complexity of learners' writing output decrease,while lexical complexity increases.The results of this study have some implications for task design and task teaching in English writing teaching,and also have some reference significance for further empirical research on writing output.