On the Impacts of Pressured vs. Unpressured On-line Task Planning on EFL Students’ Oral Production in Classroom and Testing Contexts

Year 2019, Volume: 5 Issue: 3, 341 - 352, 26.11.2019

Vahid Panahzadeh Bita Asadi

https://doi.org/10.32601/ejal.651267

Cited By: 2

Abstract

The literature on task planning abounds with studies in laboratory
or classroom contexts; however, the contribution of task planning to the
testing context has remained a largely uncharted area of enquiry. The current
study is primarily focused on exploring the impacts of pressured vs.
unpressured on-line task planning conditions on EFL students’ oral production
in classroom and testing contexts. The participants of the study comprised a
total of 14 Iranian intermediate adult female EFL students from a private
language institute in Tehran. Two parallel task cards- part 2 of IELTS Speaking
Test- were given to students with and without any time pressure for task
completion in the two different contexts in fulfilment of the requirement for
promotion for the next instructional period. All performances were measured
through fluency and coherence (FC), lexical resource (LR), and grammatical
range and accuracy (GRA) indices. To compare the impacts of pressured and
unpressured on-line task planning in the classroom and testing contexts, paired
samples t-tests were conducted in SPSS. It was found that the removal of time
pressure on students’ task performance significantly impacted on their GRA in
the classroom context. Regarding the testing context, it was found that, as
with the classroom context, pressured on-line task planning led to higher FC
compared to other indices. Also, it was found that unpressured on-line task
planning had a statistically significant impact on students’ GRA. Moreover, the
authors observed that a trade-off effect exists between students’ GRA and FC
and their LR in the testing context; in other words, the more the students were
stressed out to accomplish the test task and to produce correct sentences to
get higher scores, the less they took risks to try extensive vocabulary and the
lower their LR became.

Keywords

On-line task planning, testing context, oral performance, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy

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