The Relationship between Working Memory and Accurate Relativization under Pre-Task Guided Planning Condition: DoesProvision of Explicit In struction Serve Planning’s Purpose

To channel learners’ attention toward form, meaning, or both form andmeaning during pre-task planning, guided planning (GP) that entails specifictype of instruction is mostly used. However, operationalization of GP byMochizuki and Ortega (2008) included provision of explicit instruction on agrammatical structure that in turn related their study to task-supportedlanguage teaching (TSLT). The current study builds on the study by Mochizukiand Ortega (2008) to examine the relationship between working memorycapacity (WMC) and accurate production of English relative clauses by Iranianelementary EFL learners under pre-task GP condition, in hope for detecting aconfounding variable to justify the discrepant results reported in the originalstudy. Sixty Iranian elementary EFL learners participated in the present study.Having taken an operation span task, they did a picture story-retelling task thatwas adapted from the study by Mochizuki and Ortega (2008) under GPcondition. The results revealed a strong relationship between WMC andaccuracy of relativization that is discussed in terms of humans’ limitedattentional resources, Levelt’s (1989) speech production model, and featuresof task-based language teaching (TBLT). The implications provide insight forteachers, researchers and stakeholders.

کلیدواژه ها:

Pre-Task Guided Planning ، Relative Clauses ، Task-Based Language Teaching ، Task-Supported Language Teaching ، Working Memory Capacity