The Interactive Effects Of Cognitive Ability And Writing Task Complexity On Cohesion And Coherence In Senior High School Students’ Writing

In the field of task-based instruction,a number of studies have shown that task complexity has an effect on writing performance.Appropriate adjustment of task complexity is beneficial for students to perform better in writing.In addition,there are also studies that show a correlation between students’ cognitive ability and writing output.However,few studies have included individual differences when examining the effect of task complexity on writing performance.To fill the gap of previous researches,this study aims to answer the following three questions:(1)How does the complexity of writing tasks affect the cohesion and coherence of high school students’ writing?(2)How does high school students’ cognitive ability affect the cohesion and coherence of their writing?(3)Do complexity of the writing task and the cognitive ability have interactive effects on the cohesion and coherence of high school students’ writing?In order to answer the above three questions,60 high school students were participated in this study.Two writing tasks with high and low complexity were designed for this study.All results were converted to electronic files and analyzed for cohesion and coherence by using Coh-Metrix 3.0 and then imported into SPSS 20.0 for data analysis.Research results show that(1)task complexity has an effect on cohesion and coherence of high school students’ writing,which decreases as task complexity increases;(2)high school students’ cognitive ability has an effect on cohesion and coherence of their writing,and students with higher cognitive ability achieve a higher degree of cohesion and coherence of writing;(3)task complexity and high school students’ cognitive ability have an interactive effect on the overall cohesion and coherence of writing.Students with higher cognitive ability perform better when completing the task with higher complexity.This study partially validates Robinson and Skehan’s hypothesis and has implications and references for designing instructional tasks of appropriate complexity based on individual differences.