The Effects Of Task Complexity Along Resource-dispersing Dimension On Junior High School Students’ Writing Performance

English writing performance can reflect learners’ mastery of English objectively.It plays an important role in English teaching research.The influence of task complexity on students’ writing performance has always been a hot concern among researchers.However,it is still common that junior high school English writing pays much attention on language output results and ignores output quality.Meanwhile,the importance of writing teaching is also generally absent.There is also a lot of research space on how to design tasks and grasp the task complexity to promote students’ writing performance.Most of the existing studies on task complexity focus on oral English,while the influence of task complexity on English writing performance has been less studied.So studying the influence of task complexity on students’ writing performance has practical significance.This study is based on Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis Model and tries to find the impacts of task complexity on junior high school learners’ writing performance from resource-dispersing dimension.The manipulation of resource-dispersing task complexity is conducted by the planning time and background knowledge,and the task complexity is increased by reducing time and getting rid of background knowledge.The L2 level of learners is also taken as a variable to discuss the impacts of task complexity on the writing performance of learners of different levels.In this study,96 students in Grade three chosen from a junior high school were the subjects.According to English ability,they were divided into high-level and low-level groups.The Median number of test score is the dividing line.The number of subjects in the high-level group who completed the less complex task was equal to the number in the more complex task.So did the low-level group.The researchers analyzed writing performance in terms of complexity,accuracy and fluency.After writing tasks,12 students from high-level group participated in the interview,the same did low-level group.Altogether,there were 24 students in the interview.The research questions are as follows:(1)Does the task complexity(+ /-planning time,+ /-prior knowledge)have an impact on the accuracy,fluency,and complexity of junior high school students’ writing? If so,what is the impact?(2)Does task complexity have an impact on the writing ability of second language learners at different levels? If so,what is the impact?(3)Does task complexity have an impact on junior high school students’ writing attitude(confidence or anxiety)? If so,what is the impact?The findings are as follows:(1)In terms of the impacts on task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension on EFL learners’ writing performance.As the cognitive complexity of the task increased,lexical complexity and the syntactic complexity decreased,although no statistically significant.The effects on lexical complexity are more obvious.The indicator of LD in terms of prior knowledge variable and the LSⅠindicator of lexical complexity in terms of planning time variable decreased significantly as task complexity increased.With the increase of task complexity,the accuracy of writing performance decreased.It could be seen that the increase of task complexity has a negative impact on learners’ language fluency.What’s more,the impact was significant from the variable of planning time.(2)For high level students,increasing task complexity has negative effects on complexity of lexis,accuracy and fluency of writing performance,the greatest is on fluency,but it has positive effects on syntactic complexity without planning time.For low-level students,with the increase of task complexity in terms of prior knowledge,syntactic complexity and lexical complexity would increase,except for the indicators of DC/T,LD and DC/C(it remained the same).The raise of syntactic complexity is more evident.Planning time could have a significant positive impact on the fluency and syntactic complexity(except C/T)of the English writing output,with no obvious effect on accuracy and lexical complexity.(3)Task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension has an impact on junior high school students’ writing attitude.The higher the difficulty of the task,students’ writing anxiety grows.Specifically,providing planning time and background knowledge can alleviate students’ anxiety and improve their self-confidence in the procedure of writing.The effect of background knowledge on students’ attitude toward English writing is more obvious.The results of this study partially verified the Cognitive Hypothesis Model and Limited Attentional Capacity Model,thus further enriched the task complexity theory and provided some enlightenment for the design and teaching of English writing tasks in junior high school.In the teaching process,teachers should not only analyze the characteristics of the task itself,but also consider the language level of learners,so as to set up the most suitable task for learners.Students’ writing attitude is also one of the important factors affecting students’ writing performance.In the usual writing training,teachers can increase students’ writing time appropriately and give students enough time to organize their writing.At the same time,when the writing topic is not very close to the students’ life experience,the teachers can supplement the relevant background knowledge before writing to relieve the students’ writing anxiety.