The effect s of task complexity on Chinese learners’ language production: A synthesis and meta analysisanalysis

The present meta analysis was conducted t o provide a quantitative measure of the overall effects of task complexity on Chinese EFL learners’ language production. Based on the strict inclusion criteria, 12 primary studies were synthesized according to key features. Eleven of them were meta analyzed to investigate effects of raising the resource directing task complexity. Results reveal ed that (a ) there wa s an assortment of treatments and measures, (b) there wa s a small to medium positive effect for syntactic complexity (d=0.64 ) and small effect for lexical complexity (d=0.20), which lends support t o the Cognition Hypothesis ; there wa s a small neg ative effect for accuracy ( 0.18 ) and a close to negative effect (0.01 ) for fluency in writing, which partly confirms Sk ehan’s Trade off effects, and (c ) task modality (oral or written) d id not make a significant difference on the overall effects on comple xity and accuracy , while make a significant difference on fluency .