Guided pressured vs. unguided pressured tasks and EFL learners' process writings

Planning is essential to language production. Even the most careless and speeded speech or writing comprises a degree of planning (Ellis, 2005). In the face of the wide range of research conducted on the effects of pre-task planning on L2 production, relatively little attention has been paid to the impacts of pressured within-task planning. This study was primarily aimed at investigating the effects of Guided pressured within-task planning and Unguided pressured within-task planning on the accuracy, fluency and complexity of EFL learner’s written production. The study is a novel attempt to analyze the differences between guided and unguided time-bound tasks and explore their impact on ELF learners’ process writing ability, which is an under-researched writing type among other genres of writing.The participants of the study were 30 male and female EFL learners. The participants’ mother tongue was Turkish, and their age ranged between18 and 22. In order to ensure the homogeneity of participants, the Oxford Quick Placement test was administered and those with upper-intermediate proficiency level were selected as the main participants of the study. In this study, planning was operationalized under two conditions: unguided pressured and guided pressured, and two process-writing tasks were used .Participants were required to conduct a process-writing task under unguided pressured conditions in the first session and other process-writing under guided pressured conditions in the second session. In both guided and unguided conditions, the participants were provided with two sample process-writings. The only difference was that in the guided condition, the participants were provided by the samples including underlined sequence markers, bolded passive verbs, and underlined simple present verbs plus a list of sequence markers to serve as a guide during writing.The results obtained from two-way ANOVAs revealed that the guided pressured planning condition resulted in greater complexity and fluency of the process essays than the unguided pressured planning condition. Moreover, it was found that the language produced under unguided pressured planning condition was more accurate than that of the pressured guided planned condition. As a result, the findings of the study may have pedagogical implications in language teaching, and help EFL teachers to employ guided tasks in teaching process-orinted essays in EFL and IELTS preparation courses

Keywords:

: accuracy , complexity , fluency , within-task planning , writing