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

Task complexity has been a central topic in second-language acquisition studies.Researches have generally shown that different task complexity has different requirements for students’ task cognition,which further affect the second-language writing.However,at present,most studies on the influence of writing still focused on the complexity of a single task.Based on the cognitive hypothesis proposed by Robinson,this study explores the effects of task complexity on writing output by changing the tasks in the two dimensions of resource-directing and resource-dispersing.It aimed to answer the following three research questions:(1)What are the effects of different task complexity on senior high school students’ English writing grades?(2)What are the effects of different task complexity along resource-directing dimension(+/-elemental variables)on the fluency,accuracy and complexity of senior high school students’ English writing?(3)What are the effects of different task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension(+/-planning time)on the fluency,accuracy and complexity of senior high school students’ English writing?In this study,80 students from first grade of high school in Shaanxi were selected as research participants,and conducted for 12-weeks writing teaching experiment with a total of 5 experiments.The first four times are practice experiments,the last time is a formal experiment.During the experiment,participants were randomly divided into four groups,with each student required to complete tasks with different complexity.The writing task of the formal experiment is as follows:after reading the article “Living Legend”,write a letter to the author---the feeling after reading.In terms of resource-directing,complexity is regulated by the increase of elements in writing.That is,the writing content of Group 1 and 3 must include two elements,and the writing content of Group 2and 4 must include four elements.In terms of resource-dispersing,the complexity is adjusted by providing the planning time.That is,Group 1 and 2 had six minutes before the writing task,and Group 3 and 4 hadn’t planning time.After formal writing,five students were randomly selected in each group for the interview.The complexity analyzer and Excel were used to calculate the complexity,fluency and accuracy of the students’ writings,and finally the collected data were analyzed by SPSS.The results indicate that:(1)Changes in the task complexity have significant impact on students’ English writing grades.That is,as the task complexity increases,students’ writing grades decreased.(2)Along the dimension of resource-directing,that is,increasing the number of task elements in writing,accuracy and lexical complexity of writing improved distinctly,but there was no significant change on fluency and syntactic complexity.(3)Along the dimension of resource-dispersing,that is,providing planning time before writing,the fluency and syntactic complexity of students’ writing output increased,but accuracy and lexical complexity didn’t change.This study verifies the cognitive hypothesis of Robinson,and provides some practical basis for the design of English writing tasks in high school.Teachers can adjust the complexity of the task when assigning the writing task according to the different emphasis of the writing teaching content,so that students’ writing output can achieve the expected effect.