CAF

This study examined the combined effects of two task complexity levels (i.e., high- and low-complex) and two planning conditions including pre-task planning and on-line planning on Iranian intermediate language learners’ speech production regarding complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To this end, 90 intermediate EFL learners from a language institute in Shiraz were randomly assigned into two control and four experimental groups. At first, the language learners in all groups participated in the speaking pretest. Presented with a series of picture description tasks, the participants were asked to narrate a story. During 10 treatment sessions of picture description task performance, the experimental and control groups attempted different planning time conditions including pre-task planning, online planning, and no-planning along with task complexity levels. Finally, following the last session, the posttest was administered to all participants. The narrations analysis, as well as the results of Mixed between-within groups ANOVAs and a series of one-way ANOVAs, manifested that language learners in the pre-task high complexity group outperformed all other groups in terms of complexity. Moreover, the online low complexity group and online high complexity group outperformed the pre-task planning low complexity, no-planning low complexity, and no-planning high complexity groups regarding accuracy. With regard to fluency, the pre-task planning low complexity group significantly outperformed the no-planning low complexity, no-planning high complexity, and online high complexity groups. It was also concluded that pre-task planning affected language learners’ speech fluency. The implications of the results are also addressed.

The present study investigates the efficacy of preparation time in four speaking tasks of TOEFL iBT. As the current pre-task planning time offered by ETS is very short, 15 to 30 seconds, we intended to explore how the test-takers’ speaking quality would change if the preparation time was added to the response time, giving the respondents a relatively longer online planning opportunity. To this aim, two groups of TOEFL iBT candidates were studied under pre-task and online planning conditions. Totally, 384 elicited speaking samples were first transcribed and then measured in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). The results yielded by a series of One-way MANOVA revealed the online planning group significantly outperformed the pre-task planning group in terms of accuracy and fluency across all four speaking tasks. Although with less robustness, the online planners had significantly higher speech complexity represented by lexical diversity and left-embeddedness. The results obtained through this study may challenge the efficacy of the currently provided preparation time in TOEFL iBT speaking subsection.