Strategic planning and repetition as metacognitive processes in task performance

Abstract

By manipulating strategic planning and repetition, we investigated the effects of four pre-task conditions – strategic planning, repetition, strategic planning plus repetition and strategic planning for repetition – on the oral production of 47 EFL learners performing a video-based narrative task. In general, Results of ANOVA show an intricate pattern of interaction between pre-task condition and the 4 dimensions of oral performance. The strategic planning for repetition condition exerted a positive and significant impact on learners’ accuracy, complexity, and lexical density at the expense of fluency. The repetition condition had a significant impact on fluency, lexical density, and accuracy, at the expense of complexity. The strategic planning plus repetition condition yielded significant gains only in lexical density. Crucially, the strategic planning condition did not have a significant impact on any of the dimensions of oral performance. Responses to the questionnaires show that learners’ approach to different experimental conditions is idiosyncratic and that a series of variables interact in different ways when learners perform orally in L2. These variables include the nature of the task, learners’ focus of attention during performance, and learners’ effectiveness in implementing and retrieving pre-planned ideas. Nevertheless, in general, the questionnaires show that participants saw strategic planning and repetition as beneficial to their oral performance. Together, our results add evidence to Peter Skehan’s Limited Attention Hypothesis (LAC) (1998) and highlight the importance of combining strategic planning repetition in the training of oral skills.

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