Three types of pre-task activities

Three types of pre-task activities – namely planning, prior knowledge, and rehearsal – have been examined by researchers in terms of their contribution to language production in TBLL. Planning and prior knowledge have been found to contribute to language
production. When students had time to plan for task completion, the fluency of their
language improved (Crookes, 1989; Foster & Skehan, 1996; Wendel 1997; Wigglesworth, 1997; Mehnert, 1998; Ortega, 1999; Skehan & Foster, 1999; Foster, 2001), the complexity of their language increased in terms of lexical complexity (Crookes, 1989; Yuan & Ellis, 2003) and syntactic complexity (Foster & Skehan, 1996; Ortega, 1999), and the accuracy of their language improved (Foster & Skehan, 1996; Mehnert, 1998). When students were provided with prior knowledge about the task before completing it, they produced significantly more fluent language than when they were not provided with it (Good & Butterworth, 1980).