The Effects of Planning Time on the Second Language Performance in a Narrative Task

The Effects of Planning Time on the Second Language Performance in a Narrative Task

  This study examines the effect of planning time for a narrative task on the three aspects of learner output; complexity, accuracy and fluency. Twelve Korean university students were divided into planned and unplanned groups and told a story to a partner in pairs with and without 10 minutes’ pre-task planning time. Though the planned group showed better performance in all three aspects in a narrative of the sequenced pictures, the better performance near the significance level was observed in accuracy and fluency, not in complexity. It suggests the trade-off effect between complexity and accuracy/fluency, in support of the previous studies that showed the improvement of accuracy without the improvement in complexity in the relatively less difficult tasks. The trade-off effect was further examined qualitatively through the creative and descriptive narrative samples, suggesting that even within the less difficult tasks, the creatively narrated stories could result in more complex and less accurate performance, probably due to the difficulty of the task increased by the creativity. The findings imply that planning time helps better IL performance but for the balanced improvement in the three aspects of IL, the appropriate level of task difficulty in relation to the students’ proficiency level should be provided along with the planning time.