Effects of Task Complexity on the Second Language Collaborative Writing

Nowadays, collaborative writing has gained much attention of many scholars. And task complexity is a crucial factor that influences second language(L2) writing. However, little research has explored how task complexity affects the quality of L2 collaborative writing. This study investigates the impact of task complexity on syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, and accuracy of the second language collaborative writing. English learners (N=50) in a Chinese university were required to complete two writing tasks collaboratively: a simple task and a complex task. Through analyzing their compositions, we found thattask complexity has a significant impact on syntactic complexity and high complexity writing tasks help increase the syntactic complexity of second language collaborative writing. However, task complexity has little impact on lexical complexity and accuracy. The accuracy of writing tasks is largely influenced by the task requirements. The research results may enhance the understanding of collaborative writing and task complexity and provide valuable guidance for the second language teaching.

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