Weissheimer, JanainaLeandro, Diêgo Cesar2021-04-142021-04-142020-12-17LEANDRO, Diêgo Cesar. Memória de trabalho, planejamento pré-tarefa e produção oral em inglês como L2: um estudo exploratório usando análise de grafos. 2020. 306f. Tese (Doutorado em Estudos da Linguagem) - Centro de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, 2020.https://repositorio.ufrn.br/handle/123456789/32216The present cross-sectional, mixed-methods study (Dörnyei, 2007) aimed at investigating the relationship between working memory capacity, pre-task planning and L2 speech production. It also aimed at exploring the predictive power of graph analysis in relation to L2 speech production across proficiency levels. Fifty-six speakers of English as L2, at a pre-intermediate (n = 46) and an advanced (n = 10) level of proficiency, integrated the cohort of the study. The pre-intermediate learners were exposed to three lab-like tasks: (a) a picture-description task, aimed at eliciting speech in the L2; (b) a delayed verbal protocol (Zaccaron, 2018), aimed at assessing participants’ planning process; and (c) the speaking span test in L1 (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980; Weissheimer, 2007; Prebianca, 2009), aimed at measuring verbal working memory capacity. Task (a) required participants to use the L2 to describe three pictures, for one minute each. Descriptions were made under the following pre-task planning conditions: a noplanning condition (Yuan & Ellis, 2003; Guará-Tavares, 2008), in which participants immediately described the picture, without time to plan their speech; an oral planning condition, in which they orally rehearsed their speech for one minute; and a written planning condition, in which they planned their output by taking notes for one minute. The advanced group only performed task (a) and only under the oral and written planning conditions. Speech performance was analyzed in terms of complexity (number of t-units), accuracy (errors per 100 words), weighted lexical density (proportion of novel words) and fluency (speech rate). Additionally, participants’ speech samples (both groups) were represented as speech graphs in which the nodes represented words and the directed edges indicated the trajectory of the words produced (Mota et al., 2016, 2019; Luz, 2018). According to our hypotheses, speech produced under the oral and written planning conditions would outscore the no-planning condition, and the oral planning condition, sharing more characteristics with the picture-description task, would outscore the written planning condition. Besides, as working memory capacity can influence planning skills, helping learners translate planning into task performance (Guará-Tavares, 2008), we hypothesized that pre-task planning would affect the speech of higher spans and lower spans in different ways. Lastly, we hypothesized that speech graph attributes would correlate with speech production measures and that graph analysis would successfully predict fluency in the continuum between a pre-intermediate and an advanced level of L2 speech proficiency, offering an alternative assessment. Results show that pre-task planning has exerted a positive effect on participants’ L2 speech, irrespective of the modality it assumed and that all gains in speech production measures were due exclusively to pre-task planning. Qualitative results show that participants had positive impressions toward pre-task planning and that their performance was in line with Swain’s (1985, 1993) output hypothesis.Acesso AbertoMemória de trabalhoPlanejamento pré-tarefaProdução oral em L2Análise de grafosdoctoralThesis