چکیده:
Today, learners’ interaction and collaborative task performance have attracted increasing attention from language teachers and researchers. The present study investigated whether collaborative pre-planning, task complexity manipulation, and language proficiency level play a role in learners’ interactions. To this end, 128 EFL learners from two different language proficiency levels carried out three different tasks, whose complexity was manipulated based on Robinson’s task complexity framework. Retrospective semi-structured interviews were conducted which led the researchers to a better understanding of the unobservable underlying processes they underwent in the pre-task planning stage. The learners’ interactions were closely examined, analyzing all their language related episodes quantitatively as well as qualitatively. The results partially supported the Cognition Hypothesis and highlighted that cognitively demanding tasks provide more learning opportunities as learners confront more challenges, compared to undemanding tasks. The results were highly revealing about the process learners undergo in the pre-task planning stage, which can be considered by applied linguists, language teachers and material designers in providing considerable learning opportunities.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The present study investigated whether collaborative pre-planning, task complexity manipulation, and language proficiency level play a role in learners’ interactions.
The results were highly revealing about the process learners undergo in the pre-task planning stage, which can be considered by applied linguists, language teachers and material designers in providing considerable learning opportunities.
g. , Abadikhah, 2011; Birjandi & Alipour, 2010; Roohani, Forootanfar, & Hashemian, 2017; Tavakoli & Rezazadeh, 2014; Yaghobian, Samuel & Mahmoudi, 2017).
Thus, the present study was set to examine learners’ interactions in the pre-task planning stage and the role task complexity manipulation and language proficiency can play in the process.
Non interactive Results Occurrence of LREs The researchers investigated the relationship between task complexity manipulation and the occurrence of LREs produced by the learners from different language proficiency levels during collaborative pre-task planning.
In order to see whether the difference between the occurrences of LREs in the pre-task planning stage for learners from different language proficiency levels was statistically significant, a Chi-square test was run, whose results are presented in Table 6.
Discussion The current study was set to examine the effects of task complexity manipulation on the occurrence of LREs and consequently learning opportunities during pre-task planning processes learners from different proficiency levels undergo.
g. , Ellis & Yuan, 2005; Gilbert, 2007; Sangarun, 2005; Tavakoli & Skehan, 2005) ; however, little attention has been paid to the learners’ interaction in the process of pre task planning (e.