The Research On The Effects Of Task Complexity And Working Memory Capacity In High School English Learners’ Written Production

Since the 1980 s,due to the development of task-based teaching,researchers in second language acquisition have become keen to study how to balance the development of interlanguage form and meaning.At the same time,second language acquisition is a complex dynamic system.Second language development is subject to the three systems of individual learners,language and environment,and these three systems interact dynamically.In other words,the interaction between learners,language and environmental systems determines the level of second language development.Therefore,it is of great significance to organically connect these three factors and study the working memory in learners’ individual cognitive differences.As a complex cognitive activity,writing is not only influenced by the writing task itself,but also closely related to individual cognitive differences.Working memory is an important processing platform in human cognitive activities.It also participates in the process of writing.In view of this,this study aims to explore the performance of written language output when individuals with different working memory capacity complete writing tasks with different complexity.Based on Skehan’s Limited Attention Model,Robinson’s Cognitive Hypothesis Model and Kellogg’s Writing Model,this thesis takes 60 English learners in two parallel classes of X high school in Shihezi,Xinjiang as subjects,including 30 in the high working memory capacity group and 30 in the low working memory capacity group.This study takes ± reasoning demands and ± few elements as the classification criteria of task complexity.Literature research,testing,cultural education experiments and corpus analysis are used to discuss the influence of task complexity(letter writing/reading and writing)and working memory ability to written language output of high school English learners.This study specifically explores the following three questions: first,what is the impact of task complexity on subjects’ written language output? The question consists of three sub questions.What are the effects of task complexity on the accuracy,fluency and complexity of written language output? Second,what is the effect of working memory capacity on written language output? The question consists of three sub questions.What are the effects of working memory capacity on the accuracy,fluency and complexity of written language output?Third,what are the interactive effects of task complexity and working memory capacity on written language output? The question consists of three sub questions.What are the effects of task complexity and working memory capacity on the accuracy,fluency and complexity of written language output?The results show that: first,the impact of task complexity on written language output is differentiated.Firstly,the increase of task complexity reduces the accuracy of written language output(EFT/T,E/T).Secondly,task complexity has a positive impact on the subjects’ written language fluency.Specifically,the increase of task complexity increases the number of words in each clause(W/C)and the number of words in each t unit(W/T).Finally,the increase of task complexity increases the sentence length(MLS,MLT,MLC)and the number of subordinate structures(C/T);It reduces sentence complexity(C/S),number of subordinate structures(DC/C,DC/T),number of parallel phrases(CP/C,CP/T,T/S)and phrase complexity(CN/C,CN/T,VP/T).Accuracy,fluency and complexity have competitive effects.It conforms to Skehan’s limited attention model.Second,the effect of working memory on written language output is related to task complexity.There was no general difference in written language output between high and low working memory subjects in simple tasks(letters writing);In complex tasks(reading and writing),there are significant differences in written language output between high and low working memory subjects.The specific performance is as follows: in terms of accuracy,the accuracy of written language output of learners with high working memory capacity is higher than that of learners with low working memory capacity,and the difference is significant;In terms of fluency,the improvement of task complexity increased the fluidity of written language in the high working memory capacity group.In terms of complexity,with the increase of task complexity,the syntactic complexity of high working memory capacity group is higher than that of low working capacity learners;Therefore,the individual differences of working memory capacity will affect the written language performance of second language learners to a certain extent.Especially in complex tasks,the written language output of subjects in the high working memory capacity group is more dominant.Third,for the interaction,the interaction between task complexity and working memory only exists in the individual aspects of fluency and complexity.Specifically,task complexity and working memory capacity interact significantly with the number of words in each T unit(W/T)under fluency;The T-unit length(MLT)under syntactic complexity interacts significantly with the number of juxtaposed phrases in clauses(CN/C).The fluency effect is not significant in other aspects.The experimental results show that the written language performance of senior high school English learners as a foreign language is affected by both task complexity and working memory capacity.There is a certain correlation between task complexity and working memory.At the theoretical level,for the "Limited Attention Model" proposed by Skehan,"task complexity leads to attention distribution and the increase of task complexity leads to the trade-off between language form and meaning." The conclusion provides more specific evidence.This study comprehensively examines the effects of the number of elements and reasoning requirements in English writing task complexity on senior high school English learners’ written language.In practice,teachers can adjust task complexity to promote learners’ fluency of written language output,sentence length and number of subordinate structures under complexity.At the same time,it involves the acquisition of syntactic structure,guides low-level high school English learners to pay attention to the standardization of written language expression,improves thae attention and understanding of sentence complexity,the number of syntactic subordinate structures,juxtaposition and phrase complexity,and cultivates high school English learners to pay attention to syntactic awareness and language forms in the process of writing.Make learners’ individual differences(working memory)get a deep understanding and care for students in teaching practice.