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The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in 2019 has brought our attention to online education because, to ensure social distancing, students worldwide were asked to stay at home and attend lessons on education platforms (Bao, 2020). This kind of transition also reinforces the necessity of investigating how learning activities that have been used in the physical classroom can be adapted to the online learning context. In the second language (L2) learning context, due to the different natures of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (e.g., physical distance, virtual cues), the effects of different oral tasks on L2 learning may be dissimilar in the two communication modes (Baralt, Gurzynski-Weiss, & Kim, 2016; Carver, Jung, & Gurzynski-Weiss, 2021). Therefore, an increasing number of studies have been conducted to explore how speaking activities can be designed and implemented in the computer-mediated context (González-Lloret & Ortega, 2014; Lenkaitis, 2020; Ziegler, 2016) so as to yield pedagogical implications for L2 teaching practitioners. While fruitful evidence is found in terms of L2 learners’ oral performance/proficiency and engagement in the two communication modes (Baralt, 2010; Lenkaitis, 2020; Van der Zwaard & Bannink, 2016) and learners’ perceptions of the two communication modes have also been reported (Jung et al., 2019), their perceptions of and attitudes towards different task factors in the two communication modes are relatively underexplored.
Oral tasks, according to Ellis (2003), refer to meaning-based language activities which require learners to exploit their language repertoire to fill some kind of communicative “gap” (e.g., information gap) and produce an outcome. Task researchers (Bygate, 2018; Robinson, 2011; Skehan, 2014) believe that the use of different task conditions (e.g., task repetition, planning) to develop L2 oral proficiency level is the core value of the teaching method. Among the various task conditions, pre-task planning has been regarded as one of the most crucial factors, which facilitates L2 fluency (Bui & Huang, 2018) and linguistic complexity (Foster & Skehan, 1996). Notwithstanding its omnipresence, learners’ affective dimensions for pre-task planning have been seldom reported and less has been known regarding how they perceive pre-task planning in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication settings. To fill the research gaps, this study, drawing from an extensive set of interview data from forty-eight participants, aims to explore English as a second language (ESL) learners’ perceptions of and attitudes towards pre-task planning in real-time face-to-face communication (FTF) and synchronous video-based computer-mediated communication (SvCMC) settings (Jenks & Firth, 2013). Their attitudes towards SvCMC and FTF were also investigated. It is hoped that the research findings will not only broaden our knowledge of developing L2 speaking in different communication modes but also shed light on teaching L2 speaking in both FTF and SvCMC settings.