A Study Of The Mediating Effects Of Cognitive Style On Chinese EFL Learners’ Writing Performance Under Different Task Complexity

Task-based teaching has become a popular teaching approach since 1980 s,and task,as a core unit of this teaching approach,has been attracting the attention of researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition.Task complexity is an important factor in task,which has been widely discussed and studied by scholars.There are generally two theoretical bases for task complexity that are most influential: Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis and Skehan and Foster’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model.The two theoretical frameworks have different predictions for the impact of task complexity.Robinson suggested that individual differences,such as cognitive style and motivation,may play a role in the effects of task complexity.So far,there are a number of researches on task complexity,but few of them put the two factors of task complexity and cognitive style together.Based on this,this paper introduces the variable of learner’s cognitive style on the basis of task complexity,and attempts to explore the specific performance of Chinese EFL learners with different cognitive style in the aspects of language complexity,accuracy and fluency in English writing tasks of different task complexity.Using the Extended Cognitive Style Analysis-Wholistic Analytic Test,48 English majors of Grade 3 from Sichuan International Studies University participated in the test.According to the test results,18 students were selected as subjects,among which 9 were in the holistic group and 9 were in the analytical cognitive style group,and they were in the same level of writing proficiency.The subjects were required to complete two writing tasks,the simple version and the complex version,designed according to Robinson’s resource-dispersing dimension.By analyzing the performance of the subjects in the writing task,the following research results are obtained: cognitive style has a mediating effect on task complexity,which is shown as follows: for learners with holistic cognitive style,in complex task,fluency increases but lexical complexity decreases.What’s more,for learners of analytic cognitive style,increasing task complexity has a significant positive impact on their writing performance concerning accuracy.This paper has some implications for English teaching: teachers should pay attention to the adjustment of task complexity in task designing and sequencing,and take into account the differences of students’ cognitive style to improve the efficiency of task teaching.