Theme: Speaking as an interactive process Table of content

Types of planning:
The planning discussed here is not confined to explicit planning conducted by the students before performing a task; however it includes a more implicit unintentional kind of planning. Therefore the difference between the two should be clarified.
1- Pre-speaking planning:
Pre-speaking or explicit planning means giving participants time in advance to plan their speech in terms of words, phrases and ideas. This can be achieved by requiring learners to write notes on a sheet of paper to ensure that they did in fact engage in planning and that there is evidence of this planning to be removed at the end of the planning period (Crookes, 2001: 372 and Ryo, 2005). This kind of planning is termed "strategic planning" by Ellis (2005). Actually, providing learners with the opportunity to plan in advance encourages them to organize the propositional content and this results in greater fluency during actual task performance. It also helps them handle communicative strains and pressures (Mehnert 1998: 84 and Ryo, 2005). Empirically, it was proved that speech rate increases and total pausing time decreases by giving learners planning 76 time, but the improvement diminishes with more planning time. Training students on pre-speaking planning, according to Ortega (2005), can lead to the automatization of planning in the long run. It was assumed by Mehnert (1998: 99) and Ellis (2003: 103) also that the advantage of planning is that it helps to free the learner's attention during speaking and helps him focus on accuracy and complexity rather than relying only on ready -made lexical phrases to cope with real time demands. It also indulges learners in various rule-learning opportunities to foster language acquisition (Ortega, 2005). It was also assumed that pre-speaking planning helps to foster online noticing and hypothesis testing, as well as monitoring during speaking (Mehnert, 1998: 99 and Robinson, 2003: 50). As for planning conditions, previous studies proved that the teacher-fronted condition generates significant accuracy effects, while the solitary planning condition has greater influence on complexity, fluency and turn length (Foster and Skehan, 1999). Furthermore, pre-speaking planning was assumed to reduce the amount of online planning necessary (Ortega, 2005). Clearly this implies that there is another kind of planning which needs to be elaborated namely "online planning".