Effects Of Task Planning On Grammatical Accuracy In L2 Oral Interpretation

Taking interpreting trainees as its subjects, this thesis addresses itself to one task implementation variable: planning, considers the question of how opportunities to plan a task affect performance in terms of grammatical accuracy in L2 oral interpretation, and tests some claims derived from a series of previous empirical studies in light of the theories of interlanguage continuum and speech processing. Departing from previous studies, this thesis delves into one unexplored dimension of task performance: how the production of transitional past-tense forms is influenced by different planning conditions. Statistical analyses reveal that:a. Pre-tasking planning did not significantly affect the production of past tense forms on the whole. Conversely, L2 learners exhibited a tendency of having an initially firm, but gradually loosening control of their grammatical knowledge as speech activities progressed;b. On-line planning did not necessarily lead to enhancement of the production of target-like past-tense forms, but indeed created more space and more opportunities for the subjects to facilitate their searching for the target-like forms, thus merely enhancing the probability of delivering more grammatically accurate output. What merits emphasizing is, however, whether they could really achieve perfect accuracy seemed to involve factors other than planning, such as proficiency levels, beliefs in norms, and cognitive styles, etc. The greatest finding is that under the condition of On-line Planning, significantly more non-target-like interlanguage forms were produced, demonstrating the inherent variability of developing grammar.c. External manipulations such as planning seemed to be of limited effect in assisting the retrieval of target-like past tense forms, let alone the acquisition (in the sense of internalization) of them, even for a short span of time. Subjects might return to their normal stage(a very likely unstable one) anytime when external manipulation was not atwork, suggesting that more deep-seated and possibly inherent (with language per se) explanations should be sought.This thesis derives its research question from the phenomenon of L2 performance by interpreting trainees and concludes by providing tentative pedagogical implications for oral production by L2 learners in general and the training of interpreting trainees. Of greater import is its guarded suggestion of a continuation of research into accuracy (or other functional categories besides inflections) from linguistic perspective, in the hope of uncovering underlying acquisitional constraints and seeking out conclusions of greater generalizability.