The Effect of Task Planning and Genderon Writing Fluency: A Case Study of Undergraduate Students at AMU
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Abstract
Tasked Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has widely provided learners with some opportunities to learn spoken and written language through learning activities in the major of English Language Teaching (ELT). It offers the student an opportunity to be taught more naturally. In the recent years, that there is a massive growth of interest in examining differential effects of task planning conditionson fluency, accuracy and complexity in English as a second language (ESL) context but, the present study explored the impacts of task planning and gender on ESL learners’ written performance in terms of fluency. To this end, five-hundred undergraduate English Language Learners, both male and female (within the age range of 18-24) have been recruited from Aligarh Muslim University. Two tasks were chosen as instruments for data collection. One is a narrative task (as a pre-task for five-hundred) and the other is an argumentativeessay (for two-hundred one) to measure the fluency of the participants’ written production, under different planning conditions (pre-task planning, within-task planning, and no planning). One-way MANOVA was employed as the statistical means of analysis. The findings revealed a significant effect of task planning and gender under different planning conditions inwords per minute (the number of words produced by the participants divided by the time they spent on each assignment) and syllables per minute (The number of syllables that the participants produced divided by the minutes they spent on production) regarding fluency.
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