Learners’ processes during pre-task planning and Working Memory Capacity

Abstract

he present study is part of a larger scale research (Guará-Tavares, 2011, 2013) that investigates the relationship among working memory capacity, pre-task planning, and L2 speech performance. he aim of the study was to analyze 1) what processes learners engage during pre-task planning, and 2) whether higher and lower working memory spans engage in diferent processes during pre-task planning. Learners' processes were accessed by means of think aloud protocols and a retrospective interview. Working memory capacity was measured by the Speaking Span Test. Results show that learners engage mainly in organization of ideas, rehearsal, lexical searches, and monitoring. Moreover, higher spans employ signiicantly more metacognitive strategies during planning when compared to lower spans.

Enhancing strategic planning through strategy instruction: the effect of two types of strategy instruction on learners’ oral planned performance

“…When planning an oral task, learners need to activate task-relevant information, maintain it activated and accessible until this information can be integrated to subsequent information in a coherent way; learners also need to sustain, maintain, and switch attention from the various components of the task (e.g., from meaning to form and vice-versa), suppress irrelevant L2 and L1 information, and monitor (Guará-Tavares, 2008, p. 180). Furthermore, with the opportunity to plan, learners may also make use of strategies that may assist them in planning their speech performance such as organizing the sequence of the speech, rehearsing the speech, to cite but a few (Guará-Tavares, 2016;Ortega, 1999;Pang & Skehan, 2014;Specht & D'Ely, 2017). Moreover, D'Ely (2006) draws our attention to the fact that the definition of strategic planning is not quite clear in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) field.…”

“…In other words, strategies correspond to action taken by learners, while conditions are prerequisites of a task. During strategic planning, for instance, learners may even use planning as a metacognitive strategy along with other strategies (Ortega, 1999;, Guará-Tavares, 2016Pang & Skehan, 2014).…”

<b>Planning oral narrative tasks: optimizing strategic planning condition through strategy instruction

“…In order to optimize the participants' planning time, instructional sessions were designed based on the six most reported strategies by Guará-Tavares' (2008;2016) participants: writing/outlining/summarizing, rehearsal, lexical search, elaboration, organizational planning and monitoring, and also a communication strategy -paraphrasing -which was added after the pilot phase of the study. A total of four instructional sessions were administered.…”

“…c) Can strategic planning instructional sessions assist learners to become more strategic when they plan? Following other studies on oral production (D 'Ely, 2006;Guará-Tavares, 2016;Ortega, 2005 andRossi, 2006 to cite just a few), the six participants in the study had an intermediate level of proficiency in English, which was controlled through prior observation classes and informal conversations with the students and their English teacher. All of the participants were Brazilian undergraduate students from a Letras-Inglês program of a university in the state of Paraná, aged from 19 to 23.…”

“…Aiming at understanding the impact of strategic planning on overall L2 oral performance, studies have focused on exploring: the role of different types of tasks and task complexity (Foster, 1996;Foster & Skehan, 1996, for instance), the impact of the amount of time available for planning (Mehnert, 1998, for instance), the relationship between strategic planning and working memory capacity (Guará-Tavares, 2008;2016), the relationship between strategic planning and other performance conditions (D'Ely, 2006), the strategies used by learners while they plan (Ortega, 1999(Ortega, , 2005Guará-Tavares, 2008, 2016, the benefits of planning collaboratively (Xhafaj, 2014;Xhafaj, Muck, & D'Ely, 2011), and the role of familiarity with task topics and strategic planning (Gavin, 2014;D'Ely, 2011, respectively), to cite but a few. All of these factors seem to cause an impact on learner oral performance, favoring different speech dimensions.…”