The Effects Of Task Complexity And Working Memory On Chinese EFL Learners' Written Task Performance

In the field of task-based language teaching,a large number of studies investigating the cognitive task complexity on learners' task performance have demonstrated that manipulating task complexity in an appropriate way can promote learners' language production.Although previous research has suggested that individual differences in working memory capacities play an important role in SLA,to date most previous studies did not take individual differences into consideration in task complexity study.To fill the gap,the present study set out to investigate the independent and interactional effects of task complexity and working memory capacity on Chinese college EFL learners' narrative written performance by adopting Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis.To be specific,three research questions are addressed:(1)What are the effects of task complexity increased along contextual support on the fluency,complexity,and accuracy of Chinese college EFL learners' written narrative production?(2)What are the effects of working memory capacity on the fluency,complexity,and accuracy of Chinese college EFL learners' written narrative production?(3)Are there any interactional effects between task complexity and working memory capacity on Chinese college EFL learners' written narrative production?To answer the above questions,43 freshmen majored in English from Hunan Normal University,whose English proficiency were upper-intermediate,were enrolled in the current study.They were divided into low working memory capacity group and high working memory capacity group according to their results of the working memory test.Then the participants in each group completed two writing tasks of different degrees of cognitive complexity.In the simple task,the participants were required to narrate the story while viewing the cartoon strips,whereas in the complex task the cartoon strips were removed and learners had to recall the story when performing the task.The writing output was converted into electronic form and measured with respect to accuracy,fluency and complexity,and then the data were processed through SPSS 24.0 for analysis.The data analysis revealed that:(1)Increasing task complexity manipulated along +/-contextual support dimension resulted in significant increases in fluency and syntactic complexity,but no effect on lexical complexity and accuracy of learners' writing performance.(2)Working memory had a significant effect on syntactic complexity of learners' writing performances in the complex task.Nevertheless,no significant effect was detected on accuracy,fluency and lexical complexity in either the simple or the complex task.(3)There existed one interactional effect between task complexity and working memory on syntactic complexity of learners' performance.The results of the present study partially verified Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis,and also shed some new light on how tasks should be designed to meet learners' individual differences in task-based teaching,which can be referred to task design and teaching practice.