Planning Time

This study aimed at examining the main and interaction effects of increased intentional reasoning demands, planning time, and also language learning aptitude on syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) of 226 EFL learners’ performance on letter writing tasks. The participants were first randomly assigned to three experimental groups to be given a task with differing degrees of reasoning demand (low, medium, and high) to each group. Then, within each reasoning group, we reassigned an equal number of high- and low- aptitude learners to Planning and No-planning groups by random stratified sampling. The results revealed that (a) increasing task complexity with regard to the amount of intentional reasoning demands resulted in greater lexical and syntactic complexity and less fluency while no significant effect was observed on accuracy; (b) increasing task complexity through planning time led to significantly lower syntactic complexity and fluency; (c) reasoning demands and planning time had a significant interaction effect on accuracy; and (d) the interaction effect of language aptitude was significant with neither planning nor reasoning factor, but a three-way interaction effect was found on accuracy. The findings are discussed in relation to cognitive task complexity (CTC) models which were the main impetus for this study.

Concerning the limited capacity of working memory and drawing on Limited Attentional Capacity Model and Cognition Hypothesis, this paper examined the effect of planning time on Iranian EFL writers' performance and reported on the mediating role of educational contexts on the way of the planning process. Forty-one Iranian EFL learners in two contexts (university and institute) were asked to write in an argumentative genre under different planning time conditions (pre-task planning and online planning). The results revealed that the pre-task planning, by reducing the cognitive loads on working memory, helped the learners to have better performance in terms of fluency. However, it did not exert statistically significant differences in the complexity and accuracy of the written productions. Given the context of elicitation, the results indicated a significant effect on the participants' written performance regarding complexity and accuracy. Moreover, a significant interaction effect was found between planning time and context. The findings shed more light on the understanding of the planning process as a main cognitive component of the writing process in second/foreign language learning. Furthermore, the results of the study have pedagogical implications for utilizing the planning process to improve the writing performance of language learners.

Task complexity has recently attracted great attention in second language (L2) studies. However, its potential impacts on learning transitional devices have not been considered. The current study was an attempt to analyze the impacts of manipulating task complexity conditions on EFL learners’ grammatical enhancement in terms of learning transitional devices through doing writing tasks. For this purpose, 75 intermediate EFL learners learning English in three English language institutes in Iran were randomly selected. They were assigned to four experimental groups and one control group (each with 15 participants). Each of the experimental groups was presented with a pretest, writing tasks, an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest. The participants took part in 9 sessions and in each session some transitional devices were introduced to the experimental groups with which they were supposed to write a paragraph based on a special topic using all those transitional devices. The different experimental groups received writing tasks with different complexity levels which were determined through the manipulation of factors including ± few elements and ± planning time. The participants in the control group just participated in a regular English class for 9 sessions without doing such tasks. The performances of all groups were analyzed, and the findings revealed statistically significant differences among the five groups in both the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest, after controlling for the effect of the pretest. The findings of the current study have practical implications for curriculum development and EFL writing instruction.