Does Planning Time Improve Learners' Spontaneous Performance?

Abstract

When conducting speaking tasks in the classroom, planning time is widely employed as a tool for easing the cognitive load of the tasks, and many researchers have examined its influence on learners' oral performance. These studies generally indicate that pre-task planning contributes to promoting fluency and complexity, whereas on-line planning contributes to promoting accuracy in their performances. However, since previous studies compared learners' production which had involved planning time with that which had not, in short-term, it is uncertain whether to continue speaking tasks with planning time will lead to the improvement of learners' spontaneous oral performance. To address this question, this study focused on the effects of planning time on acquisition. 24 first-year technical college students conducted two kinds of tasks: story-telling tasks and narrative tasks. Their performances were analyzed in terms of fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical complexity and accuracy. The results indicate that learners who practice speaking tasks with pre-task planning outperformed those who continue the speaking tasks with no planning in terms of fluency and accuracy in their spontaneous oral performance. As for on-line planning, no clear effect was found on spontaneous performance.