A Study Of The Effects Of Task Complexity On Senior High School Students' English Writing

Task complexity has been studied for years,and its relationship with language learners' linguistic performance has become a research focus.Of all the major theories on task complexity,the Cognition Hypothesis and the Limited Attentional Capacity Model are of great significance.These models make contrasting predictions as to the effect of increasing task complexity along various dimensions on L2 performance.Moreover,these two models have focused on speaking tasks,and considerably fewer studies have investigated how different tasks affect writing performance of foreign language learners.The research,mainly on the basis of Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis,attempted to study the influence of task complexity on writing performance of Chinese Senior High students,trying to answer the following questions:1)What are the effects of growing task complexity along resource-directing dimension on the accuracy,fluency and complexity in Chinese senior high students' writing?2)What are the effects of growing task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension on the accuracy,fluency and complexity in Chinese senior high students' writing?A total of 196 senior high students in Grade Three were recruited and then required to write a letter on selecting a hotel for holiday.They were randomly divided into four groups,each group being asked to perform a writing task under a different condition.The written products of each group were collected,and finally the effects of task complexity on fluency,accuracy and complexity were analyzed,revealing the following results:1)Increasing task complexity along resource-directing dimension(+/-elements)tends to favor fluency,accuracy and lexical complexity of L2 learners' written performance,but hinder syntactic complexity;2)With regard to resource-dispersing dimension of task complexity,pre-task planning enables students to be considerably more fluent than those without pre-planning time.However,its effects on accuracy,syntactic complexity and lexical complexity are relatively small.The findings of this research are partially in line with Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis,which enriches the theories on task complexity,and meanwhile,the findings may also have relevant implications for both task design and language pedagogy.