A Study On Task Complexity And Organizational Styles In Chinese College Students’ English Writings

In second language teaching,scholars at home and abroad have conducted a series of studies on task complexity.However,most of the studies focus on the spoken language,with only quite a few on the written language.Therefore,based on Robinson’s(2001)Cognitive Hypothesis,this study explores task effects on the complexity,accuracy,and fluency of Chinese university students’ English writing,setting the number of elements in the resource-directing dimensions and the pre-task organizational styles in the classroom as variables.The research questions are:(1)Does different task complexity affect learners’ writing performance? If so,how?(2)Do different pre-task organizational styles affect learners’ writing performance? If so,how?(3)Do matrices of different task complexity and pre-task organizational styles affect learners’ writing performance? If so,how?In this study,57 freshmen at a university in northeast China who were non-English majors were selected as the subjects and were further divided into three groups.The three groups of subjects were asked to complete different writing tasks within the same period of time,and were then required to turn in their essays as data collected for the study.The data on fluency,complexity,and accuracy produced by the writing texts were calculated through two software programs,the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)and the Lexical Complexity Analyzer(LCA).The following conclusions were drawn from the data analysis in this study.Firstly,the effect of task complexity on college students’ writing performance was only significant in terms of syntactic complexity.Specifically,as the complexity of the task increased(i.e.,the number of factors in the task increased),college students’ syntactic complexity decreased.However,there was no significant effect on lexical complexity,accuracy,or fluency.Secondly,pre-task organizational styles had a significant effect on the fluency and accuracy of college students’ writing output,but not on the complexity.Thirdly,matrices of different task complexity and pre-task organizational styles had an impact on the fluency and accuracy of college students’ writing,but not on the complexity of the writing.Specifically,the group with high-task complexity had higher fluency and accuracy compared to the low-and medium-complexity groups.In other words,as the task complexity increased,the fluency and accuracy of students’ writing output also increased.This study reveals the relationship between task complexity and the writing output of Chinese university students,affirming the Cognitive Hypothesis.Based on the findings,the study concludes with some suggestions for optimizing the design aspects of university English writing courses.