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INTRODUCTION
Over the past decade or so, a number of studies have investigated the impact
of planning on language production (e.g. Crookes, 1989; Ellis, 1987; Foster
and Skehan, 1996; Mehnert, 1998; Ortega, 1999; and Wendel, 1997). These
studies, either explicitly or implicitly, draw on information processing theory,
which claims that humans possess a limited processing capacity and, as a
result, are not able to attend fully to all aspects of a task (Anderson, 1995;
Newell and Simon, 1972). Second language (L2) learners, especially those
with limited prociency, nd it dicult to attend to meaning and form at the
same time and thus have to make decisions about how to allocate their
attentional resources by prioritizing one aspect of language over others
(Anderson, 1995; Skehan, 1996; VanPatten 1990). However, when they have
the opportunity to plan the linguistic and propositional content of an
upcoming task, they can compensate for these processing limitations and, as
a result, the quality of their linguistic output is enhanced (Skehan, 1996).
In a series of publications, Skehan has distinguished three aspects of
between complexity and accuracy. However, as we have seen, she found that
the length of time was the crucial factor that determined where the planners
directed their attention. With 1 minute to plan, the learners gave priority to
accuracy; with 10 minutes planning time, they allocated their attentional
capacity to more complex language use, to the exclusion of further
improvement in accuracy.
In contrast, Wendel (1997) argues that the trade-o involves accuracy and
uency. He suggests that whether or not learners attend to uency or
accuracy depends on the type of planning. Drawing on comments his
participants made in post-task interviews, Wendel claims that the opportunity
to plan in advance predisposes learners to attend to organizing and encoding
propositional content and this results in greater uency during actual task
performance, as the results of his study demonstrated. In contrast, he
proposes, accuracy depends on the moment-by-moment decisions that
learners make while they are actually performing the task. In such a case,
he claims, production becomes more accurate as learners access their full
linguistic repertoire but is less uent. Thus, he distinguishes strategic planning
(pre-task planning) and on-line planning (the moment-by-moment planning
during the process of task performance). It should be noted, however, that
Wendel did not actually investigate on-line planning and his proposal is,
therefore speculative. Also, Wendel does not comment on the eect of on-line
planning on complexity.
Up till now, studies have only investigated pre-task planning. An exception,
however, is Ellis (1987), although this study was not originally designed to
distinguish the two types of planning. Ellis asked learners to perform a
narrative task under three conditions. In the rst condition, they were shown
a set of pictures and then were given an hour (i.e. plenty of time) to write a
story about it. In the second condition, they were asked to retell the same
story orally but without access to their written version. The learners were
allowed to record the story twice, but only the second retelling was
transcribed and analyzed (i.e., the participants had the opportunity to prepare
for the performance). In the third condition, the learners were given another
set of pictures and asked to immediately retell the story orally. These
conditions can be distinguished in terms of whether they allowed for pretask planning, on-line planning or both, as shown in Table 1.
The results of the study showed that learners in condition 1 outperformed
the other two groups in accurate use of the regular past tense but that there
was no statistically signicant dierence between the learners in conditions 2
and 3. Relating these results to the planning conditions shown in Table 1, it
would seem that the crucial factor inuencing accuracy was the opportunity
to plan on-line and not pre-task planning. Also, on-line planning only
aected learners' accuracy in the case of a rule-based structure, not in an
item-based structure (irregular past tense forms), possibly because learners
were able to access explicit knowledge of the rule-based structure. Crookes
(1989) has pointed out that a problem with Ellis' study is that it confounds
Pre-task planning
On-line planning
1
2
3
+
+
ON-LINE PLANNING
Underlying our view of planning and its role in oral task performance is the
distinction between pre-task planning and on-line planning. Pre-task
planning is a clearly understood construct, guring in a number of previous
studies. On-line planning, however, is a new construct in planning studies
and thus requires explication.
We theorize `on-line planning' as involving a particular kind of speech
production that incorporates both `careful' production (as opposed to `rapid'
production) and `monitoring'. Both of these production processes can be
understood in terms of Levelt's (1989) well-known and generally accepted
model of speech processing. This model posits three interactive and overlapping stages of speech processing. The rst phase involves conceptualization, where the conceptual and pragmatic content of a speech is planned. This
stage encodes the message into propositions. The second stage consists of
formulation. This involves drawing on the `lexicon' to construct an internal
grammatical and phonological coding of the propositional content of the
On-line planning is, of course, required in all speech. In this article, however,
we are using the term to refer to the careful and deliberate eort that results
in what Ochs (1979) has called `planned language use'. In this type of
language use the speaker has the chance to plan and replan both the
conceptual content and formulation of the message. `On-line planning', then,
contrasts with ``rapid planning'', which involves greater improvisation and
becomes evident in Ochs' `unplanned language use'.2 The psycholinguistic
basis of this distinction is to be found in models of working memory (WM).
Baddeley and Hitch (1974) and Baddeley and Logie (1999) identify three
components of WM; the central executive or supervisory attentional system,
the phonological loop, and the visual spatial sketchpad. It is the rst of these
that concerns us here. The central executive system governs the relationship
between WM and long-term memory (LTM), allocating attention to specic
LTM systems. However, the central executive system is limited in capacity,
and the extent to which it can attend to a specic system in LTM (e.g.
grammar) will depend on the other demands that are being made on it. When
learners have the opportunity for on-line planning they are better able to
access their LTM systems via the central executive. We hypothesize that this
will assist the formulation stage of speech processing and, in particular, the
planning of grammatical features, which, as noted above, are typically
accessed later than lexical items in the planning process. Thus, when speech
production is pressured, as it is in Ochs' `unplanned language use', learners
make use of the limited processing time available to them to search mainly for
lexical material but when it is unpressured, as in Ochs' `planned language
use', they are better able to search their LTM for grammatical information,
especially morphology.
Thus, time is of obvious importance for the planning and execution of a
speech act during performance. From the point of view of the present study,
One would expect, then, that messages that have been carefully planned
and monitored in this way will display greater linguistic complexity and
grammatical accuracy. On-line-planning, however, will have a detrimental
eect on uency.
How does on-line planning dier from pre-task planning? One possibility is
that pre-task planning is directed primarily at the rst stage of Levelt's
modelconceptualizationwhile on-line planning allows time to attend
more closely to formulation. In the case of pre-task planning, learners plan
propositional content and isolated chunks of language to encode it. Even if
they do make an attempt at more detailed formulation, it is unlikely they will
be able to remember the pre-planned forms when they are performing and
thus will be obliged to formulate on-line. Just as readers tend to remember
the propositional content of what they have read, not the linguistic encodings
(Anderson and Pearson 1988), so pre-task speech planners will recall what
they want to say (i.e. the schema they have activated) rather than how to say
it. It follows that pre-task planning does not greatly assist formulation,
especially of grammatical morphology. Thus, the linguistic correlate of eort
put into conceptualizing what to say is enhanced complexity and uency
rather than accuracy. In contrast, on-line planning, as we have argued above,
allows time for the central executive of WM to operate and thus enables
learners to search their LTM for grammatical encodings. Of course, on-line
planners must also engage in conceptual planning, the rst stage in Levelt's
planning process. Thus, on-line planning leads to both enhanced complexity
and accuracy.
Finally, it is important to understand that the distinction between on-line
and rapid language use is continuous rather than dichotomous and that the
extent to which the formulation and monitoring processes referred to above
actually occur is likely to be highly variable, depending on both the amount of
time available to the learner and a host of individual learner factors such as
whether the learners are norm- or functionally oriented (Meisel, Clahsen, and
Pienemann 1981).
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The study described below addressed the following research questions.
1
THE STUDY
Design
This study is a single-factor between-participants design with three levels of
planning conditions (no planning, pre-task planning, and on-line planning).
Forty-two participants were administered a pre-test to ensure that the three
groups had equivalent English prociency at the outset of the study. Each
group performed an oral narrative elicited by means of a set of related pictures
in one of the three conditions.
Participants
The participants in the study were 42 full-time undergraduate students who
were English majors in the International Business Department of a Chinese
university. They were between the ages of 18 and 20 years old. At the time
when the data of the present study were collected, most of these learners had
been learning English as a foreign language in Chinese schools for eight years,
rst at elementary school and middle school and then in college. None of
them had ever been to an English-speaking country and they had had little
opportunity to use English for communicative purposes outside the classroom.
Their scores in their Higher Education Bureau Examination were between
100 and 120 (maximum possible = 150), with grades between A and B+ in the
oral component of this examination. The participants can be considered to
constitute a fairly homogeneous group of students in terms of their learning
history and English prociency.
As college students, they had six hours of English each week, four hours for
reading and writing and two hours for listening and speaking. Every two
weeks, they had a one-hour oral English class from a native speaker of English
from Canada.
All the students in two rst-year classes were invited and agreed to
participate in the study. In fact, they responded enthusiastically to the
opportunity. They were told that the test and tasks they would complete were
for the purposes of research but were not told the precise purpose and they
were assured that the information collected would not be used towards their
course grades.
The students were divided randomly into three groups, with 14 in each
group. The gender composition of each group was as follows: the No Planning
Group consisted of 8 males and 6 females, the Pre-Task Planning Group
consisted of 6 males and 8 females, the On-Line Planning Group consisted of 5
males and 9 females. No participants withdrew from the study.
Pre-test material
The pre-test material was a version of the TOEFL (i.e. Test 1 from Reading for
TOEFL Workbook published by the Educational Testing Service). The total test
scores and the scores of the listening section were calculated and entered into
one-way ANOVAs with the alpha set at .05. The listening section scores were
examined separately on the grounds that they provided an indicator of the
participants' on-line processing ability and thus were likely to be related to
their spontaneous language production (Hale, 1989). The results of the
ANOVAs revealed no signicant dierences across the three treatment groups
in either overall TOEFL scores (F = .39; p = .95) or listening scores (F= .464; p
= .63). Thus, it can be concluded that the three groups were equivalent in
their English prociency. Descriptive statistics are shown in Table 2.
Task
The task required participants to narrate a story orally based on a picture
composition from Heaton (1975). An oral narrative task was chosen for a
number of reasons. First, similar tasks have been used in other studies of
planning (e.g. Wendel 1997; Foster and Skehan 1996) and thus comparison
with the results of these studies would be easier. Second, because oral
narratives are monologic rather than dialogic they aord a basis for deriving
measures of learner performance that are not inuenced by interactional
variables. Third, we wished to ensure that the task was reasonably demanding
on the participants and previous research (e.g. Skehan and Foster 1999)
indicates that this can be achieved by selecting a picture story that requires
interpretation on the part of the learners.
The story was about three boys who couldn't get on a bus because four big
boys had pushed in front of them. They had to wait half an hour for another
bus. However, they later passed the rst bus, which had broken down on a
hill. The three boys laughed at the four big boys as the bus passed. The task
10
M
Mdn
SD
Range
Min
Max
Group II
Group III
Total
Listening
Total
Listening
Total
Listening
446.71
440.00
35.34
137.00
373.00
510.00
42.79
42.00
3.68
14.00
36.00
50.00
447.78
446.50
27.84
113.00
407.00
520.00
42.36
42.50
3.65
14.00
36.00
50.00
460.86
458.50
26.57
104.00
416.00
520.00
43.64
44.00
3.46
13.00
36.00
49.00
can be considered demanding given that it was necessary for the participants
to distinguish the two sets of boys and the two buses. Also, a number of
learners commented in the post-task interview that the last two pictures were
not entirely clear suggesting that the pictures lacked a clear structure.
The task instructions were given in Chinese. All the participants were
required to begin their oral narratives by saying `This morning, Tom, George,
and Bill . . . '
Task conditions
In this study, planning was operationalized at three levels: (a) no planning
(NP), (b) pre-task planning (PTP), and (c) on-line planning (OLP). The actual
instructions given to the participants in each group are provided in
Appendix A.
A small pilot study was carried out to establish a time limit for task
completion by the participants in the no-planning and pre-task planning
groups. The participants in the pilot were ve rst-year students from another
department in the same university. These students took between 3.5 and 5
minutes to complete the task, with a mean of above 4 minutes. It was decided,
therefore, to allow 5 minutes for task completion by learners in the noplanning and pre-task planning groups in the main study (i.e. the maximum
time spent by any of the participants in the pilot study). We recognized that
this was probably longer than most of the participants would actually take but
we felt that it was important to ensure that all the participants had sucient
time to complete the task and we believed that simply setting the no-planners
and pre-task planners a time limit would create pressure during performance
of the task and thus inhibit their on-line planning.
The participants performed the task in a language laboratory during a
11
listening and speaking class with only the researcher present. They were
seated separately and did not interact with each other. Their oral narratives
were audio-recorded.
1 No planning (NP)
In this condition, participants were required to perform the task immediately
after studying the pictures for a very short time (0.5 minute) and had to
complete the task within a limited time (5 minutes), so that they had almost
no time for planning the task in advance and were pressured to perform the
task thus restricting opportunities for on-line planning. To further increase a
sense of pressure on the participants, they were required to produce at least
four sentences for each of the six pictures.
12
construct provided earlier. Thus, the participants in this condition had limited
time for pre-task planning but ample time for on-line planning.
The task conditions are summarized in Table 3.
Pre-task planning
On-line planning
No planning (NP) n = 14
Pre-task planning (PTP) n = 14
On-line planning (OLP) n = 14
0.5 minute
10 minutes
0.5 minute
Limited
Limited
Unlimited
N = 42
Measures
Measures of accuracy, uency, and complexity were developed to evaluate
the quality of the participants' oral production. These measures were largely
the same as those used in other studies (i.e. in Crookes (1989), Foster and
Skehan (1996), and Wendel (1997) ). In addition, to determine whether the
participants in the on-line planning group engaged in signicant on-line
planning compared to the other two groups, the length of time taken and the
number of syllables produced by the participants in all three groups were also
calculated. In this way it was possible to determine whether the participants
had performed the tasks in accordance with the stipulated planning
conditions.
Length of time: the total number of seconds on task was counted for each
subject.
2
3
13
Dependent variables
Fluency measures: Fluency was measured in terms of number of syllables per
minute. This was chosen as a general measure of uency used in a number of
other studies (e.g. Wendel 1997) that takes into account both the amount of
speech and the length of pauses. There were two measures:
1
2
Complexity measures:
1
Accuracy measures:
1
Error-free clauses: the percentage of clauses that did not contain any
error. All errors relating to syntax, morphology and lexical choice were
considered. Lexical errors were dened as errors in lexical form or
collocation; e.g. I was waiting you.
14
Data analysis
A series of one-way ANOVAs4 were performed on all the measures followed
by post-hoc Schee tests. The alpha for achieving statistical signicance was
set at .05.
RESULTS
Planning: independent variables
The means for the independent variables are shown in Table 4. They reveal that
the on-line planning group (OLP) group took longer to complete the task
(mean = 243.6 seconds) than the participants in the no planning (NP) group
(mean = 189.3 seconds) and those in the pre-task planning (PTP) group (mean
= 186.4 seconds). In contrast, the mean lengths of time spent by the NP group
and PTP group were very close to each other. A one-way ANOVA shows that
the dierence in time taken to complete the task across the groups is statistically
signicant although the Schee Test failed to nd a statistically signicant
dierence between any one pair of groups. One reason for the failure to nd a
statistically signicant dierence between the OLP group and the other two
groups in the length of time taken to complete the task is the considerable
variance within the OLP group itself (i.e. SD = 78.96).
For both Syllables A and B there is an overall statistically signicant
dierence among the three groups. The Schee results show that the PTP
group produced signicantly more syllables than the NP group. None of the
other comparisons were statistically signicant although the two means of the
OLP group were close to those of the PTP group and higher than those for the
NP group. Thus, the dierence between the PTP and OLP groups was
negligible.
In general, then, these results indicate that, as intended, the OLP group
could be distinguished from the PTP and NP groups in terms of the amount of
time spent on task. Also, the two planning groups could be distinguished from
the NP group in terms of the amount of speech produced. With regard to time
on task and quantity of speech, therefore, the three groups functioned
dierently.
Dependent variables
As indicated earlier, three aspects of language use were examined to see how
the participants in the three treatment conditions performed the oral task. The
results of one-way ANOVAs will be reported separately for uency, complexity, and accuracy.
Locations of Signicance
PTP
OLP
Length of
time
(Sec)
186.43 (68.62) 189.29 (39.99) 243.57 (78.96)
Syll. A
194.36 (44.86) 242.50 (47.95) 235.50 (54.63)
Syll. B
173.71 (39.51) 227.00 (43.21) 210.36 (43.42)
F-value
Sig.
NP-PTP
NP-OLP
PTP-OLP
3.474
3.886
5.585
.041*
.029*
.007**
.993
.046*
.009**
.077
.101
.093
.098
.932
.598
Means (SD)
Rate A
Rate B
Locations of Signicance
NP
PTP
OLP
F-value
Sig.
NP-PTP
NP-OLP
PTP-OLP
67.16 (17.01)
60.04 (17.29)
76.23 (15.20)
71.08 (15.12)
61.73 (17.41)
55.34 (16.18)
2.737
3.412
.077
.043*
.359
.247
.690
.691
.081
.048*
Note: NP = no-planning group, PTP = pre-task planning group, and OLP = on-line planning group
15
16
Fluency
The PTP group obtained the highest uency score, more than 76 syllables per
minute for Rate A and 71 syllables per minute for Rate B. Thus, the preplanners spoke faster than both the no-planners and on-line planners. The NP
group achieved higher means for both Rate A and Rate B than the OLP group.
In other words, the OLP group spoke the slowest and reformulated or
repeated the most and the PTP group spoke the fastest and reformulated the
least when performing the task. The results of the one-way ANOVA shown in
Table 5 show that the dierence in the groups for Speech Rate A is not
statistically signicant (p = .077). In the case of Speech Rate B (where
repeated, reformulated, or replaced syllables were excluded), the overall
dierence in the treatments is statistically signicant (p = .043). The post hoc
test shows, however, that there is no signicant dierence between either the
NP and OLP groups or between the NP and PTP groups. However, the
dierence between the PTP and OLP (p = .048) for Rate B did prove to be
statistically signicant. Thus, there is some evidence to suggest that the PTP
group performed more uently than the OLP group.
Complexity
Three variables were assessed to measure the complexity of language used in
the participants' oral narratives; syntactical complexity, syntactical variety,
and lexical variety (i.e. Mean Segmental TypeToken Ratio). Results are
shown in Table 6.
Somewhat dierent results were obtained for syntactical complexity and
lexical variety. In the case of syntactical complexity both the planning groups
outperformed the non-planning group, the dierences being statistically
signicant (i.e. p = .007 for the NPPTP comparison and p = .008 for the NP
OLP comparison). However, the language produced by the two planning
groups was equally syntactically complex (p = .997). Similar results were
obtained for syntactical variety although here none of the comparisons were
statistically signicant. In the case of lexical variety, the PTP group
outperformed both the NP and the OLP group, although the dierences
reached statistical signicance only with the OLP.
Overall, these results show that pre-task planning has a positive inuence
where grammatical complexity is concerned, as reported in the previous
studies (e.g. Foster and Skehan 1996; Wendel 1997). Pre-task planning also
resulted in greater lexical variety although the dierence between the PTP
and NP groups was not statistically signicant. On-line planning works just as
well as pre-task planning where grammatical complexity is concerned but it
does not contribute to lexical variety. This appears to increase when learners
are required to perform under the pressure of time if they also have the
opportunity to plan beforehand.
17
Accuracy
Accuracy was measured in two ways; error-free clauses and error-free verb
forms. Table 7 shows the results for this aspect of production.
The OLP group had the highest mean on both measures, with the NP group
the lowest and the PTP intermediate. The ANOVA shows that there are overall
statistically signicant dierences for both error-free clauses and error-free
verb forms. The post hoc test shows that statistical signicance is located
between the no-planning group and on-line group in both cases.
It is concluded that whereas the PTP group did not produce more accurate
language than the NP group, the OLP group did. Thus, on-line planning had a
positive eect on accuracy. However, no statistically signicant dierences
were found between the two planning groups.
DISCUSSION
This study sought to examine the dierent eects of pre-task planning and online planning on the uency, complexity, and accuracy of adult Chinese
learners' oral production in a narrative task. We will begin by considering to
what extent the dierent task conditions were met, addressing in particular
whether on-line planning as a task condition was successfully operationalized.
We will then compare the eects of the dierent conditions on the
participants' uency, complexity, and accuracy, examining dierences
between (1) the PTP and NP groups, (2) the OLP and NP groups, and (3)
the PTP and OLP groups.
NP
Syn
Complex
Syn
Variety
Lexi
Variety
1.33 (.14)
8.71 (3.25)
0.63 (0.66)
Locations of Signicance
PTP
1.62 (.22)
OLP
1.61 (.28)
0.61(.071)
F-value
Sig.
NP-PTP
NP-OLP
7.480
.002**
.007**
.008**
2.523
.093
.164
.164
4.439
.018
.103
.811
PTP-OLP
.997
1.00
.025
Note: NP = no-planning group, PTP = pre-task planning group, and OLP = on-line planning group
Locations of Signicance
PTP
OLP
F-value
Sig.
NP-PTP
NP-OLP
PTP-OLP
5.152
.010**
.256
.010**
.322
4.45
.018*
.604
.020*
.170
Note: NP = no-planning group, PTP = pre-task planning group, and OLP = on-line planning group
Means (SD)
18
19
the NP group, and as a result, spoke more slowly, monitoring and editing their
language production more extensively. This again indicates that on-line
planning was successfully operationalized as a task condition in this study.
The two groups who were required to perform the task within a time limit
did not take full advantage of the time available to them. The mean times for
both the NP and the PTP groups were under 5 minutes. However, this does
not mean that the task conditions for these groups were not met. The aim was
not to ensure that the participants used the full 5 minutes but rather to place
them under pressure to perform the task more rapidly than the OLP group.
The results in Table 4 suggest that this was achieved.
We can conclude, therefore, that overall the groups performed their tasks in
line with the dierent conditions specied by the researcher. However, it is
noted that the dierences between the OLP group and the other two groups
did not reach statistical signicance and that the on-line planners diered
considerably in the time they took to complete the task. This suggests that the
extent to which learners engage in on-line planning when they have the
opportunity to do so is subject to considerable individual variation.
20
21
Given that the NP group was required to perform the task within a time limit
while the OP group was not, the NP group was expected to perform with
greater uency. Perhaps the daunting nature of the task facing the NP group
limited the degree of uency they could achieve. The restricted time limit
made them comparable in uency to the PTP group (see above) but, given all
the processing demands of the task, did not result in signicantly greater
uency than the OLP group. What the results show is that asking learners to
perform a task `cold' and under time pressure is very challenging.
On-line planning has a clear eect in the case of grammatical complexity
like pre-task planning it results in the production of more complex sentences.
According to Wendel (1997), language complexity is more closely related to
the preparation that takes place during pre-task planning. However, the
participants in the OLP group only had 0.5 minute for such a preparation and
thus did not have the chance to prepare thoroughly. Thus, the results of this
study suggest that the opportunity to plan on-line is also used to attend to
complexity. In other words, both kinds of planning contribute to more
grammatically complex language use. However, on-line planning does not
seem to benet lexical variety. Somewhat surprisingly the OLP group's Mean
Segmental TypeToken Ratio was lower than that of the NP group. One
possibility, to be discussed further when the dierent eects of PTP and OLP
are discussed (see below), is that, when given time to plan on-line, some
learners switch to prioritizing grammatical accuracy over lexical searches.
The OLP group also achieved greater grammatical accuracy than the NP
group. This result contrasts with that for the PTP group, which as we saw in
the previous section, showed no eect for pre-task planning on accuracy. It
conrms Wendel's claim that accuracy arises as a result of what learners do
during performance. It is also compatible with the results of Ellis (1987), as
summarized in Table 1 and discussed above. An explanation for this result can
be found in Skehan's (1998) dual-processing model, according to which the
learner's rule-based system requires more time and attentional capacity to
access than lexically stored knowledge. In line with this and with Levelt's
(1989) model, it can be hypothesized that the greater accuracy evident in the
OLP group in this study was due to the time the participants had to access
their rule-based grammatical knowledge during performance. It is possible,
given the emphasis on formal grammar teaching in these Chinese participants'
prior language learning experiences, that they possessed ample explicit
knowledge, which they used to formulate speech plans and to monitor
their production when time permitted.
22
23
Table 8: Summary of comparisons between each planning group and the noplanning group
Group
Pre-task planning
Online-planning group
Fluency
Same
Same
Complexity
Accuracy
Grammar
Vocabulary
Greater
Greater
Same
Same
Same
Greater
24
No planning
You have just seen a set of pictures. These pictures tell us a story. Now I would like you
to retell this story in English. Imagine that somebody has never seen these pictures and
25
this is his/her rst time to learn about the story from you. So please tell the story as
detailed as you can. In addition, you have only 5 minutes and you must produce at
least four sentences for each of the six pictures. If you like, you can produce more than
four sentences for each picture.
You can begin your story like this: This morning, Tom, Jack and George . . .
Please begin.
Pre-task planning
You have just seen a set of pictures. These pictures tell us a story. In a short while, I
would like you to retell this story in English. Before you retell the story, you have 10
minutes to plan what you are going to say. Imagine that somebody has never seen
these pictures and this is his/her rst time to learn about the story from you. So please
tell the story in as much detail as you can. To assist you to prepare, you are given a
sheet of paper and a pencil. You can use them to write some notes. But please don't
write a complete sentence either in Chinese or in English. When you begin to tell the story,
I will take the paper away. You have 5 minutes to retell the story and you must produce
at least four sentences for each of the six pictures. If you like, you can produce more
than four sentences for each picture.
You can begin your story like this: This morning, Tom, Jack and George . . . Please
prepare now.
(After 10 minutes)
It is time for you to begin. Please begin.
On-line planning
You have just seen a set of pictures. These pictures tell us a story. Now I would like you
to retell this story in English. Imagine that someone has never seen these pictures and
this is his/her rst time to learn about the story from you. So please tell the story as
detailed as you can. You can take as long time as you can when telling the story. If you
think you say something not correct or not to your satisfaction, you can correct it as
many times as you can. For each of the six pictures you must produce at least four
sentences. If you like, you can produce more than four sentences for each picture.
You can begin your story like this: This morning, Tom, Jack and George . . .
Please begin.
26
B. When you told the story, did you think about grammar? Vocabulary? The best
way to organize your story? Give examples.
5 When you told the story, did you think about grammar? Vocabulary? The best way
to organize your story? Give examples.
NOTES
1 Guidance took the form of suggestions about
how to use the 10 minute planning time to
consider syntax, lexis, content, and organization of what they would say.
2 Ochs' (1979) distinction refers to the characteristics of the actual discourse that speakers produce. It is not intended to suggest that
some speech acts are `planned' and some are
`unplanned'.
Obviously,
planning
is
involved in the production of both planned
and unplanned discourse.
3 A c-unit is dened as an utterance that
consists of a single complete sentence,
phrase, or word and that has a clear
semantic/pragmatic meaning in the context
in which it occurs. In eect, it is the same as
a T-unit except that it includes elliptical
utterances (see Foster, Tonkyn, and Wigglesworth 2000 for a discussion of this
measure).
4 One reviewer suggested that, given the
range of dependent variables, a MANOVA
REFERENCES
Anderson, J. R. 1995. Learning and Memory: An
Integrated Approach. New York: Wiley.
Anderson, R. and D. Pearson. 1988. `A
schema-theoretic view of basic processes in
reading comprehension' in P. Carrell, J.
Devine, and D. Eskey (eds): Interactive
Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 37
55.
Bachman, L. and A. Palmer. 1996. Language
Testing in Practice: Designing and Developing
Useful Language Tests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baddeley, A. and G. Hitch. 1974. `Working
memory' in G. Bower (ed.): The Psychology of
Learning and Motivation Vol. 8. New York:
Academic Press. pp. 4790.
Baddeley, A. and R. Logie. 1999. `The multiple-component model' in A. Miyake and P.
Shah (eds): Models of Working Memory. New
York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 2861.
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