A Study Of The Effect Of Task Complexity On Junior High School Student’s English Writting

Task-based language teaching is a common approach in the current language teaching process.It stresses on strengthening the mastery of language knowledge and focusing on the unity of language form and meaning through completing communication tasks.Previous studies have shown that in order to make the task-based approach effective,it is very important to study the characteristics of the task itself and the impact of the task on the language use of language learners.Most of the previous studies focused on the impact of different oral tasks and the influence of task characteristics on the oral performance.Writing,as a kind of language output,is also bound to be affected by task characteristics.But there are a few of studies of the influence of task on writing performance.Based on the cognitive hypothesis model of task complexity proposed by Robinson(2001),this paper analyzes the effect of task complexity on writing performance.The main problems of the study are: what is the effect of task complexity on the overall level of students’ writing;what is the effect of task complexity on the complexity,fluency and accuracy of students’ writing.In this study,60 ninth graders from a senior high school in Taiyuan were selected as the subjects,and 60 texts were collected from two writing texts with different complexity.According to the scoring standard of the middle school entrance examination,the overall score of the writing text is made,and the measurement standard of the writing performance is proposed by Wolfe Quintero to measure the writing output performance of the subjects.This study finds that task complexity has obvious impact on the overall performance,fluency,accuracy and syntactic complexity of writing performance,but not on vocabulary complexity.Specifically,with the increase of task complexity,the overall score of students’ composition decreases,fluency and accuracy decrease,but syntactic complexity increases.Therefore,when designing writing tasks,teachers should give full consideration to students’ familiarity with the topics involved in the tasks,give full play to teachers’ guiding role in teaching,and timely supply necessary background information or reference vocabulary expression for students.Teachers can also appropriately increase the difficulty of tasks and stimulate students’ interest in writing.In addition,the combination of reading and writing andvarious ways of feedback are beneficial to improve students’ writing performance.