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Abstract
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This study explored the effect of planning time on Iranian EFL writers' performance with regard to different task types and the contexts of elicitation. The participants were 41 Iranian EFL learners who were asked to write in two different writing genres (i.e. expository and argumentative) under different planning time conditions and in two contexts of the university and institute. In the pre-task planning condition, the participants were given 10 minutes to plan before writing the main task for 20 minutes. In online planning time condition, on the other hand, the learners were not given any time to plan the task and were asked instead to commence their composition for 30 minutes immediately. The results from evaluating the participants' textual outputs in terms of three language production aspects, namely complexity, accuracy, and fluency, revealed a significant effect of planning time on the learners' written performance. The learners in the pre-task planning group wrote more fluent compositions compared to online planners. However, the planning process did not exerted statistically significant differences on the complexity and accuracy of the written productions. Given the context of elicitation, the results indicated a significant effect on the participants' written performance in terms of accuracy and fluency. Moreover, a significant interaction effects was found between planning time and context and also between the context and task type. In contrast, no significant difference was found between the learners' writing performance in the two task types. The findings of this study shed more light on understanding the effect of planning process as a major cognitive component of the writing process in second/foreign language learning. The results indicated that the pre-task planning, by reducing the cognitive loads on working memory, helped the learners to have better performance during the task completion. Furthermore, the results of the study have pedagogical impl
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