Pre-task planning and discourse cohesion: Analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ referential use in oral narratives

Abstract

While the research on pretask planning has concentrated on its effects on learners’ task performance in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexity, its possible influence on the overall discourse level, such as discourse management and coherence, has been largely ignored. The present study addresses the inadequacy by uncovering the potential effects of pretask planning on Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners’ selection of referential expressions in oral narratives. Fifty-six intermediate-level learners were tasked with retelling the story of Modern Times under one of two conditions, that is, either with 10-minutes strategic planning or without any planning time. An additional 25 native speakers (NSs) also narrated the same story under the same task conditions. Their narratives were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded based on a coding scheme that distinguished the roles of characters, types of reference, and discursive status of reference. A combination of statistical analysis and discourse analysis showed that (1) compared with NSs, the EFL learners were overexplicit in using noun phrases and proper names to refer to singular characters, but not so in joint reference to the major characters; and (2) pretask planning facilitated more target-like selection of referential expressions when major characters were referred to, although it did not bring the learners’ performance up to NS standards. However, the impact of planning time on referential use seemed to be moderated by the role prominence. These findings were explained within the framework of Levelt’s speech production model and Skehan’s Limited Attentional Capacity Hypothesis.