The Effects of Pre-Task Strategic Planning on Iranian EFL Learners' Writing Cohesion

Cohesion is one of the important points which should be considered by the writers of various types of writing. The present paper aimed to investigate the effects of duration of planning on Iranian intermediate EFL Learners’ cohesion in terms of number of cohesive devices they employ in their writings. Out of 150 intermediate female EFL learners studying English in a Language Institute in Isfahan, Iran, 45 were selected through convenience sampling. The participants were divided into three groups based on the planning time, namely, no time, five minutes and ten minutes for pre-task planning, respectively. A writing task was administered among the participants, and they were asked to write about it. A series of Chi-square tests were administered to analyze three kinds of cohesive devicess, namely, conjunctions, ellipses and substitutions. The results showed more cohesive devices used by the participants who had time for pre-task planning compared with those who had no time; however, no significant difference was observed among the three groups. The findings could be employed by English language teachersto devote appropriate time to pretask planning for writing courses.

کلیدواژه ها:

planning ، conjunctions ، ellipses ، substitutions ، Task-based language teaching.