Strategic planning in task-based language teaching: The effects of participatory structure and task type

This paper investigates the influence of task type and participatory structure (or classroom organisation) in pre-task planning on the fluency, complexity and accuracy of learners' oral production. 32 participants, divided into three experimental groups and one control group, carried out two tasks – a decision-making and an information-exchange task. The control group had no opportunity to plan while the experimental group participants planned for each task in one of the three planning conditions: pair work, individual or teacher-led. Individual task performances were scored for fluency, complexity and accuracy prior to statistical analysis. Results show that planning led to significantly superior performance than no planning across all dependent variables. Pair work planning significantly advantaged fluency compared to teacher-led planning but not accuracy or complexity. Consistent with previous research, teacher-led planning had some benefits for accuracy, and individual planning for complexity, but neither of these effects reached significance. The decision-making task, meanwhile, led to greater complexity than the information-exchange task. These results can be interpreted as implying that there are benefits in varying classroom organisation in pre-task planning, and that individual planning, whose value has sometimes been underestimated, should not be neglected.