Integrating Questioning and Task Planning: Does it work for EFL Oral Production?

Although the role of task planning conditions affecting EFL learners’ oral performance has been of investigators’ enduring concern, to the best of our knowledge, no study so far has investigated the influence of planning time in combination with a cocktail of questioning instruction on the oral performance in EFL settings. The present study thus examined the combined impact of pre-task planning and questioning instruction on the accuracy and complexity of Iranian EFL learners' oral presentation of intermediate learners of English at a private language institute in Mazandaran. Drawing on Bloom's taxonomy of higher order questions (HOQs), a pretest posttest quasi-experimental design was utilized. Initially, three groups including a control and two experimental groups engaged in pre-intervention oral tasks and performed the post-intervention oral tasks ensuing rehearsal planning plus HOQs (EX1), strategic planning in addition to HOQs (EX2), and no planning condition along with HOQs (CG) instructions. Results pointed to the positive impact of pre-task planning integrated with HOQs on the complexity as well as accuracy of oral narrative tasks. More specifically, engaging in rehearsal planning condition plus HOQs proved to be optimal for inducing better results in EFL learners’ oral production in terms of all three measures of performance. Accordingly, the findings rejected a conflict between complexity and accuracy in that both of them were found to have increased simultaneously. Finally, drawing on the outcomes of the investigation, it is proposed that in order for task-based instruction to more beneficially contribute to EFL learners' task performance, a more flexible view of implementing TBLT needs to be merged with other influential educational factors including thinking skills which have proved to be fruitful in the present study.