The Effects Of Planning On Fluency, Complexity And Accuracy In Second Language Argumentative Writing

Planning plays a key role in high level cognitive activities and has gained an important status in almost all the writing models developed by contemporary cognitive psychologists and thus has been a focus of interests to a great number of scholars in EFL research. The present study, dwelling within the framework of task-based instruction and second language writing research, investigates the effects of three types of planning i.e. pre-task planning, on-line planning and integrated planning (the combination of pre-task and on-line planniag) on complexity, accuracy and fluency of an argumentative written task. The participants were 36 senior middle school students. They were evenly divided into four groups. One was the controlled group, i.e. no-planning group. The other three groups were pre-task planning group, on-line planning group and integrated planning group. The four groups were asked to write the same written argumentative with different planning opportunities. The results showed that all of the three types of planning lead to improvements, but from different aspects. Pre-task planning resulted in greater accuracy (error-free clauses, p<.05) but had no effect on complexity or fluency. The opportunity to engage in unpressured on-line planning assisted greater syntactic variety (number of different verb forms, p<.05) but did not enhance accuracy and had a detrimental effect on fluency. The integrated planning, that is, the combination of pre-task and on-line planning, had effect merely on syntactic variety, with no marked effect on fluency or accuracy. The results indicated that trade-off effects involve not only between accuracy and complexity (Skehan & Foster, 1997), accuracy and fluency (Wendel, 1997, cited form Yuan and Ellis, 2003), but also involve between complexity and fluency. We also present "proficiency ceiling effect" to explain the lack of ideal improvement for the integrated planning group. That is, what the learners' do not know cannot be remembered or used no matter what adequate opportunities are provided. To the low-proficiency learners, planning has some effects in pushing interlanguage development...