Effect Of Task Complexity On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Since the 1980s,the focus of research has gradually shifted to the relationship between task complexity and language output of foreign language learners in the second language acquisition field.Theories about task complexity mainly include Cognition Hypothesis and Limited Attentional Capacity Model.In Cognition Hypothesis,task complexity is divided into two dimensions: resource-directing dimension and resource-dispersing dimension.This study mainly took Cognitive Hypothesis as the theoretical basis,and investigated the effects of task complexity on senior high school students’ English writing from resource-directing dimension,and aimed to answer the following research questions:(1)What is the effect of task complexity on senior high school students’ English writing?(2)What is the effect of task complexity on complexity,fluency and accuracy of senior high school students ’ English writing?In this study,80 students from Class 8 and Class 9 of Nanping Senior High School in senior two were selected as the research subjects,and Class 8 was complex task group and Class 9 was simple task group.Students from two groups needed to complete a writing task with different complexity.Task complexity was manipulated by varying the number of elements that needed to be considered in the writing task.The specific writing tasks for simple task group and complex task group were shown as follows:(1)Recommending a local restaurant to tourists,including three reasons for recommendation.(2)Recommending a local restaurant to tourists,including six reasons for recommendation.Students’ writing texts were scored by two highly experienced English teachers and analyzed from three aspects: complexity,fluency and accuracy.On the basis of data analysis,the following research findings were obtained: first,increasing task complexity along the resource-directing dimension(+/-few elements)can improve senior high school students’ English writing performance;second,increasing task complexity along the resource-directing dimension(+/-few elements)can improve lexical complexity,fluency and accuracy of senior high school students’ English writing,but it lowers syntactic complexity of senior high school students’ English writing.The results of this study can give certain enlightenment to task designers and English teachers.In order to effectively improve students’ English writing proficiency,we should fully consider the characteristics of the task to design or to select appropriate tasks;in addition,we should manipulate task complexity appropriately according to different teaching focus.