The Impact of Form-focused Guided Strategic Planning on Oral Task Performance
Fatemeh MAHDAVIRAD

Abstract

The main purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of form-focused guided strategic planning on accuracy, complexity, and fluency of L2 oral output. The twenty upper-intermediate level freshmen English major participants of the study performed a planned and then an unplanned picture-prompted narrative task. The results of the statistical analysis revealed that the participants produced a more accurate, more complex, and more fluent discourse in their performance of the task when they benefited from form-focused guided strategic planning which contained detailed instructions about how to plan, by being advised to focus on form. The guidance included an explanation of the structural and lexical patterns employed to express a sequence of events. The findings highlight the need to consider guided strategic planning as a task feature in syllabus design and materials development and the necessity of considering this task feature for accomplishing accuracy, complexity, and fluency in oral task production.

Keywords: TBLT, form-focused guided strategic planning, accuracy, complexity, fluency

You can download the full paper in pdf format here