Abstract:
This thesis reports a study that investigated the effects of pre-task planning and online planning on L2 writing performance and L2 writing development. Learners’ pre-task planning and while-writing processes were also examined. It aimed to produce findings that would contribute to the theoretical issues of how allocation of attenional resources affects learners’ language use and how practicing in different task conditions influences L2 development as well as pedagogical issues of how tasks can be manipulated in L2 classrooms to promote L2 learning. It attempted to fill the research gaps in task planning literature in terms of the longer-term effects of planning, which has been lacking, the effects of planning on written production, which is scanty, and how pre-task planning affects during-task attentional allocation. The study was conducted in a Chinese university and seventy-five non-English major freshmen participated in the study. At the beginning of the study, the participants all completed a writing task in 25 minutes, which served as a pre-test. They were then assigned into three groups for treatment: a no planning group (NP), which had 15 minutes to complete each writing task; an online planning group (OLP), which had 25 minutes to complete each task, and a pre-task planning group (PTP), which had 10 minutes to plan before completing the task in 15 minutes. They completed four experimental writing tasks under different task conditions on a weekly basis. The four experimental tasks were all compare/contrast type of essays but with different topics. A week after the last experimental task, participants wrote another writing task all under the same writing condition, which served as a posttest. In the following week, a post-task questionnaire survey and an interview were administered to collect data on participants’ pre-task planning and while-writing processes. Ten weeks later, a delayed posttest was administered in the same way as the posttest. Learners’ written production was measured in terms of accuracy, complexity, fluency, and organization. Results revealed that neither pre-task planning nor online planning affectedL2 writing performance in terms of accuracy, syntactic complexity, or organization of the essays. Pre-task planning had a positive effect on lexical complexity. With respect to fluency, pre-task planning had a positive effect on repair fluency (i.e. dysfluency) while online planning had a negative effect on temporal fluency (i.e. writing speed). With regard to the effects of planning on L2 writing development, both pre-task planning and online planning had some beneficial effects on accuracy over time but no effect on complexity. Both pre-task planning and online planning had negative effects on temporal fluency and no effect on organization. The analyses of questionnaire and interview data indicated that pre-task planning provided more space for during-task attention to form and the online monitoring and editing may raise learners’ awareness of certain problematic linguistic form(s).