THE INFLUENCE OF PLANNING ON FLUENCY AND COMPLEXITY IN WRITTEN TASK PERFORMANCE

Drawing on the previous studies on the effects of planning on fluency, complexity and accuracy, this article reports a study of the influence of two different sources of planning on second language (L2) learners' written performance in free-writing task. The study was classroom based, and the participants (79) were the second year students at Nagaoka National College of Technology. All the participants were assigned free-writing tasks to complete within 5 minutes. After the first writing, participants in one class were asked to do planning task individually, and those in the other class in pairs. After the planning, all the participants engaged in the same writing task. Because the free-writing task conducted in this study aimed at promoting the learners' fluent self-expression rather than their accurate language production, accuracy was not measured. The specific focus was on the number of total words (=fluency) and words per T-unit (=complexity) produced in the first writing and those in the second writing. The results show that, whereas individual planning resulted in greater fluency than the opportunity engaged in paired planning task (p<.001), no significant difference in complexity was identified between the two planning tasks. It is tentatively proposed that individual pre-task planning is effective in terms of the fluent written production of L2 learners