Original Research
The Impact of Task Structure and Immediacy on International EAL Learners’ Attention Orientation During Speech Production
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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.
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Keywords
Task Complexity; Attention Orientation; Linguistic Form; Immediacy; Task Structure
Author(s) Information
Publisher’s Note
The claims, arguments, and counter-arguments made in this article are exclusively those of the contributing authors. Hence, they do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of the authors’ affiliated institutions, or EUROKD as the publisher, the editors and the reviewers of the article.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the international EAL students who participated in this study and the Canadian ESL program that facilitated data collection.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
CRediT Authorship Contribution Statement
Mohamadreza Jafary: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data collection, Investigation, Formal Analysis, Writing- Original Draft
Sedigheh Sahkib Kotamjani: Methodology, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing, Project Administration, Funding
Azadeh Amoozegar: Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision- Funding Acquisition
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Ethics Declarations
World Medical Association (WMA) Declaration of Helsinki–Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Participants
This study was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards outlined in the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (2013). Ethical approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), IRB-2025-017. All participants were informed about the purpose of the study, and informed consent was obtained before participation. Participation was voluntary, and all data were anonymized to ensure confidentiality. The study involved no physical or psychological risk to participants.
Competing Interests
The authors declare that there are no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to ethical and privacy considerations, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. All data have been anonymized to protect participants’ confidentiality.