The Impact of Task Structure and Immediacy on International EAL Learners’ Attention Orientation During Speech Production

Abstract

The paper examines the effects of task structure and task immediacy in attentional allocation in the process of engaging with (L2) speech production among international learners of English as an additional language (EAL) in Canada. In a series of four experimental conditions (structural support (structured vs. unstructured)) and immediacy (Here/Now), sixty B2 learners were asked to complete a narrative task. There/Then). Participants provided retrospective verbal reports to establish the sources of dysfluency in their speech. There are four processing stages: conceptualization, lexical encoding, syntactic encoding, and phonological encoding, which were based on the model of speech production proposed by Levelt to code the dysfluency markers. The findings indicated that unstructured tasks produced more pauses associated with conceptualization, suggesting greater requirements for message planning. Conversely, There/Then condition tasks, especially with structural support, had many more dysfluencies that were lexical, syntactic, and phonological encoding in nature, indicating increased focus on the linguistic form. The large effect size across conditions indicates that task design strongly influenced the allocation of attentional resources. Most notably, structured narratives in the past tense, without contextual support, significantly heightened attention to form, as evidenced by increased pauses during lexical, syntactic, and phonological encoding.