A Study On The Effects Of Task Complexity On The Emotional Engagement And Writing Output In Senior High School Students’ English Collaborative Writing

Emotional engagement is an important component of foreign language learning engagement and has a significant impact on the learning process and outcome.The existing studies show that task factors are important elements influencing emotional engagement,but most of the exploration is based on the meta-concept of learning engagement.Additionally,few studies have selected task materials from the perspective of task complexity and examined the influence of task factors on emotional engagement in specific writing tasks.Therefore,this research takes English collaborative writing as the writing task,and 35 students in a senior high school in Fen Yang in Shanxi Province as the research subjects to explore the effects of task complexity on students’ emotional engagement and writing output in collaborative writing through writing tests,questionnaires on students’ emotional engagement and interviews.The data is collected to answer the following research questions: 1.Does task complexity have any effect on senior high school students’ collaborative writing output? If yes,what are the effects? 2.Does task complexity have any effect on senior high school students’ emotional engagement in collaborative writing? If yes,what are the effects? 3.Is there a correlation between students’ emotional engagement and their output in collaborative writing? If yes,what is the correlation between them?The research results show that: 1.Task complexity has a significant effect on the senior high school students’ writing output in collaborative writing including complexity(syntactic complexity and lexical complexity),accuracy and fluency.In complex tasks,the syntactic complexity and fluency of the writing are higher than those of simple tasks;the lexical complexity and accuracy of writing output decrease with the increase of task complexity.2.As task complexity increases,students’ emotional engagement towards tasks shows a significant downward trend,but the changes in overall emotional engagement and peer cooperation are not significant.3.The lexical complexity is positively correlated with students’ overall emotional engagement and the two dimensions containing emotional engagement towards tasks and peer cooperation.Emotional engagement towards tasks is negatively correlated fluency,while no significant correlation is found in other aspects.Based on the main findings of the study,teaching suggestions are proposed to help improve students’ emotional engagement and writing performance in tasks with different complexity,and then the limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.