Effects Of Task Complexity And Task Difficulty On Writing Performance Of EFL Learners

Due to the syllabus as an effective task-based curriculum design unit,the rise of task-based instruction,and the flourishing of approaches to achieve a balance between language form and meaning,research focusing on the task itself has become a hot topic in the field of second language acquisition.Researchers explored how task variables affected the learners’ language production and how to design different tasks to cater to particular pedagogical objectives.There are still two major limitations.Firstly,the existing studies mainly focus on digging the effects of task complexity on learners’ oral production.However,writing,as one type of language production,is often neglected in the task-based language teaching and researching.Besides,the complexity reflected in the writing task itself is different from the learner’s perception of complexity,and the data obtained from measures of writing performance cannot reveal how learners judge the complexity of the task,which may be the source of divergence in research results.Based on Skehan’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model and Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis,the present study makes a clear distinction between task complexity(the objective dimension)and task difficulty(the subjective dimension)and studies the effects of both task complexity and difficulty on EFL learners’ written language production,as well as the correlation between task complexity and the rating of task difficulty.The study specifically addresses three research questions:1.What are the effects of task complexity on EFL learners’ writing performance?2.What are the effects of task difficulty on EFL learners’ writing performance?3.What is the correlation between task complexity and task difficulty?The present study adopted quantitative statistical analysis and corpus linguistics method to investigate the effect of task complexity and difficulty on EFL learners’ writing performance.Thirty non-English majors with the same English proficiency level participated in the study.They were asked to finish three writing tasks with significantly different complexity and finish one questionnaire after completing each task to assess the students’ perception of task difficulty.90 compositions and 90 questionnaires were collected and put into the computer for statistical analysis.They were not graded holistically but analyzed in terms of global measures of fluency,accuracy and complexity respectively.For syntactic complexity,L2SCA(Lu,2010)would be used,and Ant Conc for lexical complexity.For accuracy,Polio and Shea’s(2014)guidelines for error coding were used in coding the errors.All the quantitative data would be analyzed by SPSS.The findings indicate that task complexity significantly influences learners’ writing output.The more difficult the task is,in general,the more fluent and complex the writing performance will be;however,accuracy is on the contrary;task difficulty is somewhat related to some characteristics of learners’ written production,particularly with respect to learners’ perception of stress.When learners try to complete less complex tasks,they are more relaxed and self-confident.The ratings of task difficulty is also influenced by task complexity.The more complex the task is,the more difficult learners perceive.The current study supports Skehan’s and Robinson’s model.And it shows that cognitive complexity of tasks and learners’ affective factors have strong effects on learners’ writing and foreign language learning undoubtedly and tasks of different processing demands control students’ attention in predictable ways.It is hoped that this study could make a clear distinction between these two dimensions,clarify the effects of task complexity and difficulty on learners’ writing performance and offer more insightful information for a deeper comprehension of the effects of task difficulty and complexity on the language acquisition process of EFL learners.The study also provides support for task-based SLA research with its focus on written language production.Some pedagogical implications for task design are presented to help learners develop their foreign language proficiency.