A Study Of The Effects Of Task Complexity On Senior High School Students’ English Linguistic Performance And Alignment In The Reading-writing Continuation Task

In the reading-writing continuation task,the effect of promoting learning brought by alignment is conspicuous,and there are quite a lot of relevant researches about the effect of alignment.With the rise of Task-based Language Teaching(TBLT),the research on task is abundant,and task complexity has turned to a hot topic.More and more researches have been done on the impact of task complexity on second language learners’ language production,but the research of the influence of task complexity on the reading-writing continuation task is relatively scarce.In addition,few researchers have examined the factors that affect the alignment effects of the reading-writing continuation task,let alone the effect of task complexity on high school students’ English linguistic performance and alignment in the reading-writing continuation task.This study designs experiments under the theoretical framework of Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis,which combines task complexity with the reading-writing continuation task and carries out an empirical study on 40 students in each of two parallel classes of Senior Three.With +/-content support(with or without paragraph opening cues)as variables,the data is analyzed by SPSS 23.0 software to explore the effects of different task complexity on the linguistic performance and alignment effect in the senior high school students’ English reading-writing continuation task.The following research questions are answered specifically: 1.What are the effects of task complexity(+/-content support)on the complexity,accuracy and fluency of senior high school students’ linguistic performance in the reading-writing continuation task? 2.What are the effects of task complexity(+/-content support)on the alignment effect of the senior high school students’ reading-writing continuation task?The findings are summarized as follows.1.There is no significant effect on the complexity,fluency and accuracy of senior high school students’ English reading-writing continuation task brought by the task complexity.However,the fluency,lexical complexity and syntactic complexity are relatively high when the prompts are given at the beginning of paragraphs in the reading-writing continuation task.2.Low-complexity(+content support)reading-writing continuation tasks are more likely to facilitate learners’ lexical and syntactic alignment effects with the reading material.Although the results do not support the Cognitive Hypothesis,the study can provide some implications on the control of task complexity and the design and implementation of reading-writing continuation tasks.