Effects of collaborative vs. individual pre-task planning on EFL learners’ L2 writing: transferability of writing quality

Although many studies have investigated the differential effects of collaborative pre-task planning (CP), individual pre-task planning (IP), and no pre-task planning (NP) on EFL learners’ writing quality, none has explored such effects under the condition of combining IP with CP and whether such potential effects can be transferred to a new writing task. To bridge this gap, the study assigned 120 Chinese college learners to one of the four groups: CP group, IP group, IPCP group, and NP group. Two argumentative writing tasks were used in this study to collect the required data. To produce task 1, the learners in CP, IP, and IPCP groups were asked to do the relevant planning tasks before writing, while the learners in the NP group were required to write immediately. To explore learning transfer, one week after they produced task 1, the learners in all four groups were required to produce task 2, for which there was no planning time. The results showed that the learners under the CP condition composed writings with higher syntactic complexity than the learners under IP, IPCP, and NP conditions for both two tasks, with no such effects found for other measures of writing quality. Limitations, suggestions for future studies, and implications were discussed.