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perception about the story-retelling activity. The level of agreement was categorized into strongly disagree, disagree, agree, and strongly agree. The second adaption was about the clarity of instructions which directed students with positive or negative attitudes towards planning to answer the corresponding questions.
The revised questionnaire consisted of two parts. Part one consisted of personal questions asking the name, age, gender, and English learning experiences of the participant. Part two were composed of eight multiple-choice questions and one open-ended question to find out (1) what perceptions participants had towards different planning situations and (2) how various planning situations helped or hindered participants’ performance. The questionnaires were distributed to all the participants and were collected right after the main story-retelling activity.
3.3 Procedure
The study began with a sampling test to choose ninety participants of high beginning level. Subsequently, a familiarization task (Ortega, 1999) preceded the main task to acquaint participants with the task instructions and procedures. Three planning conditions for the current study were individual unguided planning, individual guided planning, and paired guided planning. What follows were the details of the procedure in this study.
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Flyers, the standardized sampling test published by Cambridge ESOL, was administered to 150 students from which a sample of 90 participants were finally selected. The researcher scored the speaking section with another colleague, who scored the speaking performance by listening to the recordings. Inter-rater reliability was guaranteed by conducting Cohen’s kappa statistics, which were considered acceptable at 80 percent (Cohen, 1960). One week before the main task, the
participants were acquainted with the instruction and task procedures by completing a familiarization task, which involved the same procedure with the main task except for three distinctions: (1) participants were offered no planning time, (2) the narrative task was of variant content from the main task, and (3) participants’ oral performance was recorded for the purpose of acquainting participants to the audio recording, but the recording data was excluded from the data analysis (Ortega, 1999).
After elaborating on the difference between the familiarization and the main tasks, the researcher next presented the same part of the detailed process during which three planning conditions were implemented.
There were three different planning situations in the current study: condition one was the individual planning without a guided worksheet, i.e. individual unguided planning group (IUP), condition two was the individual planning with a guided worksheet, i.e. individual guided planning group (IGP), and condition three was the
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paired planning with guided worksheet, i.e. paired guided planning group (PGP).
Planning condition one was the control group, while planning condition two and three were experimental groups. Both familiarization and main tasks were carried out during regular class time in the regular classroom. At first, the researcher used Chinese to explain and demonstrate the narrative task to prevent participants from misunderstanding task demands. Then, the participants were assigned the role of speakers and were provided with the picture prompts. After receiving pictures, the speakers listened to an audio recording depicting the story in L1. The audio input was succeeded by 10 minutes of planning time. Before planning, paper and pens were distributed to participants to make notes. During this time, the speakers in IGP and PGP groups received guided worksheets. The participants were informed that the guided worksheet provided valuable information about how to make use of planning time and what grammatical structures to concentrate on, such as the grammatical usage of present tense. During planning time, speakers in IGP and IUP groups planned by making individual notes. These two groups were distinguished by having or not having the support of guided worksheets. As for speakers in the PGP group, they discussed and made notes in pairs with guided worksheets. All participants were told that the notes and the worksheet would be taken away after the planning phase was over. After the planning, speakers narrated the story in English based on the
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picture, while the other classmates played the role of listeners who received jumbled pictures that needed to be sequenced. Such an arrangement created an information gap to bring out participants’ best performance since participants would be motivated by the communicative need to make their classmates rearrange the jumbled pictures correctly (Brown & Yule, 1983). There was no time limitation for the performance.
Speakers’ oral performances were recorded during both task executions; only the recordings of the main task were transcribed and analyzed according to some established criteria.
For IGP and PGP groups, they were differentiated by the individual planning or paired planning variable, and the following details of procedure were taken care of. To prevent learners from influencing each other, the individual planners were instructed to maintain silence and carefully prepare for the story-retelling task during planning time. Besides, the paired planners were only allowed to talk to their partner during planning time, and no one was allowed to discuss with each other during the story-retelling activity. In terms of the language used during discussion, paired planners were free to communicate in either English or Chinese. This was to ensure that participants could make the most of the planning time.
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