Online task planning and L2 oral fluency: does manipulating time pressure affect fluency in L2 monologic oral narratives?

Abstract

Abstract This study attempts to widen our understanding of how manipulating pressured online task planning affects L2 oral fluency. The principal aim of this study is to investigate the effect of reducing time pressure on L2 learners’ oral speech production while performing video-based narrative tasks in terms of fluency. The study adopted a video-based narrative task to elicit spoken data from forty secondary school students. Online planning was operationalised through slowing down the video clip in the + online planning condition. Measures of breakdown and repair fluency were adopted to capture learners’ oral fluency. The findings revealed that online planning had a positive effect on L2 oral fluency regarding the number of filled pauses. Whereas it had a negative impact on fluency regarding mean length of silent pauses. No effect was found regarding number of silent pauses and disfluencies. The results will be discussed and pedagogic implications will be proposed.