The Effects Of Task Complexity On Junior Middle School EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writing Performance

Since the 1980 s,task-based language teaching has become a hot topic in foreign language teaching.In recent years,more and more researchers have begun to study how the task-related factors affect learners’ language output from a cognitive perspective.Study about task complexity is also an important aspect of task teaching,and it has been widely studied in the field of second language acquisition.The current prevailing theories in terms of task complexity are Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis and Skehan’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model.The cognitive hypothesis believes that the attention resources are multi-dimensional.With the increase of task complexity,the complex task produces better effects and the accuracy will not be counterbalanced by complexity;However,Limited Attentional Capacity Model believes that human’s attention resources are limited,the fluency,accuracy and complexity of language output will compete for limited resources,and as the complexity of tasks increases,the effect of language output will be worse.Based on this theory,this study analyzes the impact of task complexity on the accuracy,fluency and complexity of junior high school English learners in argumentative writing performance with the two dimensions of planning time and reasoning demands.In this study,60 participants from Class three and four,Grade Nine in Lanzhou No.45 Middle School were selected by pre-test.First of all,these participants were randomly divided into two groups: Group 1and Group 2,and then they were given writing tasks with different complexity.The first writing task does not require reasoning,but 10 minutes provided for planning.The second writing task requires participants to make certain reasoning but without planning time.From no reasoning demand to the certain logical reasoning,the complexity of the task is gradually increasing.And as the planning time decreases,the task complexity also increases.Finally,all data were collected and analyzed by SPSS 21.0.Through analysis,the following conclusions are drawn: as the task complexity increases,the fluency,accuracy and syntactic complexity of the participants’ language output decrease,but the lexical diversity increases,which basically confirms to Skehan’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model.He believes that these three dimensions of language output,that is,the fluency,accuracy,and complexity of the output language,will compete for limited attention resources.The results of this study have certain implications for task design and task teaching in foreign language teaching.Teachers should select tasks with appropriate complexity according to students’ individual differences to gradually improve students’ language skills.At the same time,it also has certainreference significance for empirical research related to written production research.