摘要
There are both pedagogical and theoretical grounds for asking second language writers to plan before they start writing.The question then arises whether pre-task planning(PTP)improves written output.To address this question,this article reviewed 32 studies by comparing the effect of PTP either with no planning or with unpressured online planning(OLP).These studies also investigated the moderating effect of variables relating to the writer participants,the nature of the planning,and the writing tasks.The main findings are:(1)There is no clear evidence that PTP leads to better overall writing quality when this is measured using rating rubrics,(2)PTP generally results in more fluent writing,(3)its impact on syntactical and lexical complexity is inconsistent and negligible,(4)OLP does sometimes result in increased linguistic accuracy,and(5)there is insufficient evidence to reach clear conclusions about the role that moderating variables have on the impact of PTP,but the results suggest that collaborative(as opposed to individual planning)can lead to increased accuracy and that PTP tends to lead to more complex language when the writing task is a complex one.The article concludes with a set of principles to ensure better quality research and three general proposals for the kind of future research needed.
要求第二语言写作者写作之前先做计划是有教学和理论依据的。但尚无法确定任务前计划(PTP)是否会提高写作质量。为了回答这个问题,本文综述了32项相关研究,对比了PTP与无计划的写作或无压力的在线计划(OLP)的效果。这些研究也调查了与写作者、写作计划的内容和写作任务有关的变量对写作输出的影响。主要发现是:(1)使用评价量表来衡量写作质量时,没有明显的证据表明PTP可以提高总体写作质量;(2)PTP通常可以使写作更流畅;(3)它对句法和词汇复杂性的影响可以忽略不计;(4)OLP有时会提高写作的语言准确性;(5)由于研究的局限性,无法就其他调节变量和PTP的影响之间的关系得出令人信服的结论。但研究结果显示,协作计划(而非个人计划)能提高写作的语言准确性,而且在写作任务较为复杂的情况下,PTP通常会提高写作语言的复杂程度。本文最后提出了一组原则,用以提高研究质量,并就未来研究所需提出了三条建议。
