Metacognitive awareness and the fluency of task-based oral output across planning conditions: The case ofIranian TEFL students

The present inquiry inspected the impact of metacognitive awareness on the fluency of 114 Iranian TEFLlearners’ task-based oral output. The participants in six intact classes were selected from a populationof 120 English sophomores based on their scores on proficiency pre-test. The classes were randomlyassigned as two tripartite groups of experimental and control participants each embracing three groupsof pre-task planners (PTP), on-line task planners (OLP), and pre and on-line task planners (POLP). Thefifteen-session metacognitive awareness program in the form of a topic-based listening and speakingcourse was based on Cotterall's (2000) principles of autonomous learning and three sets ofmetacognitive strategies, centering learning, arranging and planning learning and evaluating learning(Oxford, 1990). Employing a narrative task type, the researcher collected the data using a 2x3 factorialdesign with two levels of metacognitive awareness and three levels of planning. It was hypothesizedthat fluency would improve through metacognitive awareness under various planning conditions. TwowayRepeated Measures and One-way ANOVA analyses of the research data revealed significant fluencygains in all experimental participants compared to the control ones and in the control POLP planners.The findings have pedagogical implications for educators and teachers and highlight the need forstrategic investment.