| The study of task complexity in second language output has been a hot topic in the field of task research and second language acquisition.Although the studies on the task complexity effect at home and abroad are increasing,there is still no consensus on the specific impact of task complexity on the writing performance in the resource-directing dimension.Hence,this research aims to investigate the impact of increasing task complexity along the resource-directing dimension on the overall quality and linguistic complexity of English as a Foreign Language(EFL)writing.This study selected 44 freshmen and 46 juniors from an English major in a university in Shandong province.The students in each grade were divided into two groups to complete a simple writing task or a complex writing task.After the writing task,the learner self-rating scale was filled in to test task validity.All written texts are scored by holistic scoring,and the syntactic complexity(CP,CN,C/S,VP/T)and lexical complexity(NDW,TTR,SVV1,NV)of the writing performance were analyzed with the second language syntax complexity analyzer and the second language lexical complexity analyzers.The experimental data were processed by SPSS for the independent sample t-test,analysis of variance and correlation test.The findings demonstrate that increasing task complexity based on element variables and reasoning needs has a negative impact on the overall quality of foreign language learners’ writing performance,and the overall writing quality of high-proficiency students decreases significantly.Task complexity has different effects on different dimensions of linguistic complexity.Specifically,for high-proficiency students,as task complexity increases,the syntactic complexity(CP and C/S)improves,vocabulary diversity(TTR)and noun diversity(NV)decrease.For low-proficiency students,as task complexity increases,the syntactic complexity(CP,CN,C/S,VP/T)and noun diversity(NV)decrease,while lexical diversity(NDW)and verb diversity(SVV1)increase.The study also reveals that the overall writing score is strongly positively correlated with CN and NDW,weakly positively correlated with SVV1,and weakly negatively correlated with NV.At last,the author points out the limitation of the study and makes suggestions for English writing teaching and future research.In conclusion,this study provides empirical data for the effect of task complexity,and also has enlightening significance for the study of foreign language writing teaching,and provides a certain supporting basis for the Trade-off Hypothesis and Cognition Hypothesis. |
