Effect Of Task Complexity And Ways Of Writing On The Learning Opportunities And Linguistic Output By Chinese EFL Learners

Since Robinson(2001)proposed the Cognition Hypothesis,many studies have verified the effect of task complexity in monologues or dialogues.However,most studies adopted oral tasks and the effect of task complexity on interaction and learning outcome in collaborative writing work has received little attention.In order to fill these gaps,the current study is conducted to investigate the effects of task complexity and ways of writing on the learning opportunities and linguistic output drawing on Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis and theories of collaborative learning.Three questions are addressed:(1)What are the effects of task complexity on the learning opportunities and linguistic output in individual and pair writing respectively?(2)What are the effects of ways of writing,i.e.,individual and pair writing on the learning opportunities and linguistic output under the conditions of different task complexity?(3)Are there any interactional effects between task complexity and ways of writing on the learning opportunities and linguistic output?To answer the questions,the experiment in the present study adopted two narrative tasks with different levels of cognitive complexity,structured task as the simple task and unstructured task as the complex one.There were two ways of writing: individual writing and pair writing.Fifty-one first-year English majors of intermediate language proficiency level from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies were randomly assigned to the individual writing group or the pair writing group,17 students in the individual writing group and the rest forming 17 pairs in the pair writing group.Individual learners performed a simple and a complex task alone and they were required to think aloud while writing.Learners in pair were required to work together to finish a simple and a complex task.After each task,learners were invited to fill the questionnaire about their opinions toward the task and the way they performed the tasks.The oral data of the individual think-aloud and the pair interaction were recorded,transcribed and coded for learning opportunities measured as language-related episodes(LREs)and the written output was analyzed in terms of accuracy,fluency and syntactic complexity(CAF).All these data were put into SPSS 17.0 for statistical analysis.The results revealed that:(1)increasing task complexity along the resource-dispersing dimension led to strikingly higher accuracy but lower syntactic complexity of the written output in individual writing while no significant effect was found on fluency as well as learning opportunities in both the individual and the pair writing group;(2)pair writing triggered more learning opportunities regardless of the task cognitive complexity but individual writing resulted in greater fluency and syntactic complexity of the written output.(3)interactional effect between task complexity and ways of writing was found on one aspect of syntactic complexity,complex T-units per T-unit(CT/T).These results partially supported Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis in terms of syntactic complexity,and revealed the benefits of pair collaborative writing for facilitating the learning opportunities.The findings in the current study can provide insights for teachers in task design and task implementation in language teaching class.