The Effects Of Different Lengths Of Pre-task Planning Time On Chinese College English Learners' Oral Production

The objective of this study is to investigate, in a task-based language teaching context, the effect of different lengths of time for pre-task planning on the Chinese EFL learners' oral performance in terms of accuracy, fluency and complexity. The results of the present study were drawn with quantitative and qualitative research methods and they were explained with information processing theory, Skehan's cognitive model, and some other related theories. These conclusion/s are beneficial to the balanced development of Chinese college English learners' oral performance.The 60 subjects participating in this research were full-time second-year undergraduate students studying in the School of Economics and Management of Lanzhou University of Technology. They were randomly assigned to five treatment groups to deal with the internal validity of the study, and the length of pre-task planning time for these five groups are 0 minute, 1 minute, 3 minutes, 5 minutes and 10 minutes respectively. A pretest was administered one week before carrying out the present task to further ensure the levels of oral English proficiency were equivalent across the groups. Results show that the differences between these five groups on the levels of oral English proficiency are not significant.Oral narrative task is chosen for the subjects and all their speech production was analyzed quantitatively in terms of six variables: speech rate B, total pausing time, syntactic complexity, lexical variety, error-free clauses, accurately-used verbs. In addition, the qualitative data were derived from the analyses of the post-task questionnaire and the notes taken by the subjects while planning.The results are as follows:1. Pre-task planning opportunity has positive effect on the fluency, complexity and accuracy of planned oral narrative production. The planners produced more fluent language than the nonplanners in Rate B, at the same time the percentage of total pausing time is lower. As for complexity, pre-task planning enhances syntactic complexity. Besides, pre-task planning positively influences accuracy and the percentage of error-free clauses and accurately-used verbs show a raising trend.2. Different lengths of pre-task planning have different impact on fluency, complexity and accuracy. Fluency of the subjects' oral production increases in line with the increasing amount of planning time. As for complexity, syntactic complexity has the trend of increasing with the increasing amount of planning time, while it is not true with lexical variety. The result of the accuracy is in line with the results of the former studies, that is, the subjects having only 1 minute to plan performed best of all. That is to say, the effect of increasing amount of pre-task planning time was not found on accuracy.3. Pre-task planning process involves a conscious task assessment and conscious allocation of attentional resource.