Task Planning, Gender and Narrative Retelling

The aim of present research was to investigate the influence of task planning (fluency versus accuracy) on Iranian male and female EFL learners' narrative retellings. To this end, a group of 32 students, studying English at Islamic Azad University in Ardabil, participated in this study. A single-page unseen text was given to the participants and they were supposed to reproduce that text twice. The subjects had 4 minutes of pre-planning time before each reproduction. In the first reproduction, they were asked to narrate the story as fluently as possible. But in the second reproduction, they were supposed to retell the text as accurately as possible. One SPANOVA and one SPMANOVA were used to analyze the effects of two independent variables of task planning (a within-subjects variable) and gender (a between-subjects variable) and their interactions on three dependent variables of fluency, accuracy, and complexity. The analyzed data revealed that task planning, gender, and interaction between them had no significant effects on the fluency, accuracy, and complexity of narrative retellings of learners.