Abstract:
The current study aimed to examine the effects of strategic planning, online planning, strategic planning and online planning combined (joint planning), and no planning on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of oral productions in two simple and complex narrative tasks. Eighty advanced EFL learners performed one simple narrative task and a complex narrative task with 20 minutes in between. The order of the two stories was counterbalanced to control for any possible practice effect. The results suggest that no planning in both tasks was the least effective. Strategic planning led the learners to elevate both their complexity and fluency significantly in the narrative simple task and only their fluency in the complex task. Online planning helped the participants improve their accuracy significantly both in the simple and complex tasks. Finally, joint planning resulted in the significant elevation of accuracy and fluency in the simple task on the one hand, and complexity and accuracy in the complex task on the other. With respect to the effect of task complexity, the interaction between task complexity and CAF was significant. The results and comparisons between groups are discussed in the light of Levelt’s model of speaking, Skehan’s Trade-off Hypothesis, and earlier studies.
Machine summary:
In other words, in the JPG the influence exerted by online planning outweighed that of strategic planning resulting in more accurate language meaning that when learners have time to think while they are speaking their working memory has the opportunity to access the syntactic information and monitor the output which can justify the improved performance of the JPG with respect to accuracy (Yuan & Ellis, 2003).
The effects of online planning on fluency is the clearest of all compared to accuracy and complexity, since given learners’ focus on formulation and rule-based system, it is plausible to foresee a decrease in fluency which held for the present study in OPG resulting in an insignificant fluency in line with other studies (Ellis, 2005; Yuan & Ellis, 2003; Ellis, 2009).
Since the participants were performing a simple task, they did not think about the relationship between pictures resulting in less use of hypotactic language such as subordinate clauses which led to a less complex production (Geng & Ferguson, 2013).
The online planning group’s (OPG) performance in both complex and simple tasks was similar meaning that their results were significant only in terms of accuracy.
In other words, since the participants of this group did not have any time for planning neither prior to nor while performing the task, they did not have a proper amount of time for conceptualization or formulation meaning that they could not produce a language capable of meeting the requirements of significant complexity, accuracy, or fluency.