“Hang on a sec, teacher”: Collaborative and individual strategic planning as a means to perform L2 oral tasks at a public school

Abstract

Bearing in mind the challenges involved in speech production (LEVELT, 1989), especially in the L2 (KORMOS, 2014), this study examines strategic planning (ELLIS, 2005) and its impact on the performance of learners of English as an L2 in an oral task carried out after they had planned it individually or collaboratively. Drawing from the output hypothesis (SWAIN, 1985), this piece of research analysed quantitative and qualitative data from the narratives produced by 17 high school students. The quantitative analysis showed a statistically significant advantage for the outcome variable when the participants planned collaboratively. At the same time, while the results for fluency and accuracy were not statistically significant, they also favoured the same planning condition. The qualitative data indicated wide acceptance of oral tasks with the use of WhatsApp. It is suggested that the adoption of tasks that include strategic planning as a means to lessen the attentional burden involved in L2 speech production (FORTKAMP, 2000) may be an attractive pedagogical resource to help English students to learn the language in a contextualized way.

Keywords:
Oral Task; Strategic Planning; Collaborative Work; Output Hypothesis; Second Language Acquisition; WhatsApp