The Effect of Strategic Planning Time and Task Complexity on L2 Written Accuracy

Over the past two decades, there has been a plethora of research attempting to find out the role of “task” in second and foreign language teaching and learning. A growing body of research in the past two decades has been devoted to the investigation of various aspects of task-based language teaching. A review of the studies conducted on various aspects of tasks reveled that there is a gap in the literature on the joint effects of task complexity and different types of planning time on L2 learners’ oral and written performance. Therefore, the present study set out to investigate the effects of strategic pre-task planning and task complexity on L2 learners’ written performance in terms of accuracy. To this end, 50 English language learners, both male and female, were chosen from an English language institute in Iran. A reliable valid task with simple and complex versions was used to collect written data from the participants. T-test was employed as the statistical means of analysis to compare the means of accuracy. The findings of the study revealed that pre-task strategic planning time in both simple and complex task led to more accuracy. The results of the study might carry significant implications for syllabus and task designers, language teachers in EFL/ESL contexts, and second language acquisition researchers.

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