Effects Of Planning Conditions On The Oral Narratives Performance Of Chinese Learners Of English

When foreign language learners speak, the speed of their production, the variety and precision of their words, the complexity of their utterances, and the accuracy of their speech is influenced by a number of factors, such as the variables of features of task design and implementation. Ellis (2003) announces that"task design variables appear to have the greatest impact on complexity…. There is also evidence that task design variables influence fluency…we will see that implementation variables may be more important where accuracy is concerned."The task implementation factors are mainly concerned on the planning."More and more studies have shown that if the learners have the opportunity to plan, the quality of their linguistic output is enhanced."(Skehan, 1996) The present study examined the effects of different planning conditions on Chinese English learners'oral performance. Furthermore, during the performance the interaction between the planning conditions and learners'proficiency was focused on the present study.This paper recalls the related theories about the theory of information processing and the theory of attention allocation. Humans have limited information processing capacity and must therefore prioritize where they allocate their attention (Skehan, 1998a). Attention resources are limited and this constraint has far-reaching effects on second language processing and use. Moreover, attention allocation is closely related to the short term and long term memory system (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974). According to Baddeley, that on-line planning can help language learners to better access to the Long-term Memory (LTM) via central executive to search for the grammatical information. That is to say, under on-line planning condition, language learners can rebalance their limited attention resources not only on the lexical items but also on the grammatical features. Another important theory about attention is that different proficiency learners have different burdens to allocate their attention resources. A study by VanPatten (1990) has demonstrated that the attention allocation might function differently for native and non-native speakers due to the different language resources. Based on these theories, this paper concerns that the effects of different planning conditions on the oral production of Chinese EFL learners. At the same time, it also concerns the interaction between the different levels of language proficiency and the different planning conditions. The present research exams the effects of the planning on the improvement of oral narrative performance for EFL Chinese learners and thus tentatively explores what effects of proficiency of Chinese EFL learners with high and low levels has on the performance of an oral narrative task under no-planning and on-line planning conditions.Thirty-two non-English major graduate students in Chongqing University were divided into two groups --- the high proficiency level group and low proficiency level group. Their proficiency level was assessed by their English score of their entrance exam for graduate study. During the experiment, two groups performed the same oral narrative task (picture-story retelling) in two different task conditions (planning conditions: no-planning and on-line planning). In the end, what they spoke was recorded and transcribed. The data collected from transcriptions was analyzed through ANOVAs in SPSS to find the differences concerning fluency, complexity and accuracy between the two groups in the two planning conditions. Furthermore, two-way ANOVAs in SPSS were employed to research the interaction between the language proficiency and planning conditions.The findings show that the high level EFL learners perform better than low level learners in all aspects of language production under the no-planning condition. Nevertheless, the on-line planning has the positive effects on the complexity and accuracy for both the high level and low level EFL learners. But there are different impacts of the on-line planning condition for the high and low proficiency level learners. The high level EFL learners benefit most in the improvement of complexity of language production. However, the low level EFL learners benefit most in the addition of accuracy of language performance. So it is concluded that if the learners are able to plan on-line, their limited capacity can be reduced and they can allocate more attention on the grammatical information to speak more complex and accuracy. The purpose of the study reported is to reveal ways in which attentional resources can be channeled to achieve pedagogic benefit, despite any prediction for processing meaning first, conditions can be set up so that form is noticed, and that it is also possible to manipulate the conditions for maximizing the chances to improve their limited language processing capacity, especially for low proficiency learners.