The effect of planning in L2 Spanish oral narratives

Abstract

This study reports on an experiment in which a group of 14 American learners of Spanish as a foreign language performed two monologic production tasks with and without time for planning. Several hypotheses were tested concerning language complexity, grammatical accuracy, lexical complexity, and degree of fluency. As predicted, it was found that learners produced more complex, but not more accurate, language when given planning time. The results support the claim that planning is a task condition that can be manipulated in second language (SL) tasks so as to foster more developed interlanguage (IL) use in the short term.