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

The present study aims to explore the effects of different lengths of pre-task planning time on Chinese college English learners'narrative writing in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity. It is an empirical study involving both the quantitative and the qualitative research methodsThe 150 subjects, selected from Lanzhou University, were divided into five experimental groups, and they were respectively given 0 minute,3 minutes,5 minutes, 8 minutes and 10 minutes to plan before writing. In the experiment, all the 150 subjects were required to compose a narrative writing based on a set of cartoon pictures with the same procedures. They were given different planning time firstly, and then they were required to start their writing immediately at the end of planning time and complete their writing within the given time. After they handed in their compositions, a questionnaire was distributed to each student to fill in.All the subjects'compositions were measured with the number of words per T-unit for fluency, the number of error-free clauses for accuracy, the number of clauses per T-unit for syntactic complexity, and mean segmental type/token ratio for lexical variety. The data collected were analyzed by using SPSS 11.5 package. The analysis results showed that pre-task planning led to improvement in all these three dimensions, but different lengths of planning time impacted upon fluency, accuracy, and complexity in different ways. Fluency was found to be rising in line with the increase of pre-task planning time, with non-planners getting the lowest score and 10-minute planners getting the highest score. Accuracy didn't increase accordingly with the increasing amount of pre-task planning time, with non-planners obtaining the lowest score and 5-minute planners obtaining the highest score. With regard to complexity, the results showed that syntactic complexity was increasing in line with the amount of pre-task planning time, but it was not true for lexical variety. In addition, the researcher also analyzed the subjects' questionnaires, and the results not only confirmed the experiment results but also further proved the claim of limited processing capacity and the existence of trade-off effects.Finally, the research results were discussed and explained on the basis of Kellog's model of writing processes, Vanpatten's information processing theory and Skehan's cognitive model.The present study might be enlightening for future studies concerning planning in task-based language teaching and helpful for L2 teachers and students to improve L2 writing. But there were, inevitably, some limitations, especially in the subjects, the task type, and the measures adopted, which still await further research.