Machine summary:
"While there is little doubt – if any at all – as to the effectiveness of CLT and task-based instruction in fostering L2 fluency compared with traditional methods practiced over decades, accuracy concerns remain as a haunting problem to the proponents of these well-established approaches to language teaching, so to speak.
Since language learners do not have ready-made language plans for new situations of language use, which involve establishing constant form-meaning relations (Lightbown, 1998; Widdowson, 1978), the real time pressure created will give rise to accuracy and fluency challenges on the part of the learner.
Planning Time An Overview Skehan (1996) claims that under certain circumstances learners prefer to pay attention to their lexicalized knowledge of language, which is likely to lead to fluency improvement, while under other circumstances they have to refer to their rule-based system which results in greater complexity and accuracy.
Robinson (personal communication, as cited in Skehan & Foster, 2001) mentions that learners may resort to planning time in order to avoid structures which they have not mastered yet and as a result achieve high levels of accuracy.
Foster and Skehan (1996) found that both the undetailed and the detailed planners produced fewer errors than the no-planners on the decision-making task, and that only the undetailed planners performed more accurate language than the no-planners on the personal task, while there was no effect for planning on accuracy for narrative task.
The findings in this study did not indicate a statistically significant effect on L2 accuracy as a result of providing planning time, which is contrary to the findings of Foster and Skehan (1996), Mehnert (1998) and Wigglesworth (1997)."