The Effect of Pre-task (Strategic) Planning on the accuracy and Complexity of Oral Production of Iranian EFL Students (Focusing on Meaning, Form and Form-Meaning)

The present study was designed to investigate the effects of pre-task planning on the oral production of a group of EFL learners. The participants were 60 male and female college and language school students, aged 13 to 38 who were assigned to four experimental groups. In this study planning was operationalized at four levels: Minimal Planning (MinP)/Control group, meaning planning (MP), Form planning (MF), and Meaning and Form planning (MFP). The participants performed two tasks: an instruction task and an argumentative task subsequently. Each participant in the MP, FP, and MFP conditions first received a 10-minute think-aloud training before initiating the tasks. Then, they were given 10 minutes to pre-plan for each of these monologues and take notes. To analyze the data a series of one-way ANOVAs and a series of two-way ANOVAs were used followed by Bonferi post Hoc test to establish where the differences were located. The results show that each of the three foci of strategic planning is more effective than the MinP condition in promoting complexity and accuracy of speech. Planning allows extra attentional resources to focus on form during task performance with theresult that the processing loads of the conceptualizer and the formulator are reduced and thus, learners can monitor their performance in terms of accuracy and complexity. These findings are of obvious pedagogic relevance as they indicate that L2 learners do best in terms of accuracy and complexity when they engage in strategic planning which focuses jointly on meaning and form

کلیدواژه ها:

task ، strategic planning