A comparative study of solitary and teacher-led pre-task planning effect on EFL university learners’ writing performance: A case of an online platform amidst COVID-19

Many educational institutions turned to the employment of online platforms during the Corona crisis. However, there were concerns for the students’ solitary plans of learning as in many parts of the world students did not have the experience of such online courses. This study compared the effect of a solitary pre-task intervention with a teacher-led pre-task planning on the Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance during COVID-19. Besides, it investigated the patterns of improve-ment in writing through an 8-session treatment conducted through Skype. Having employed a qua-si-experimental design through repeated measures, the researcher sought voluntary participation of 40 Iranian EFL university students who were randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups. The intervention included the instruction of seven types of paragraphs, which led to a writ-ten task as their writing performance. The repeated measures ANOVA and t-test results confirmed that both teacher-led pre-task planning and solitary pre-task planning elicited a statistically signifi-cant improvement within groups in students’ writing scores from the first session to the last session with an exception of the very last session for the solitary group which could be due to lack of inter-nal motivation. There was no significant difference between the two groups in their writing perfor-mance leading to the conclusion that solitary pre-task planning has been as effective as teacher-led. Thus, both types of pre-task planning can be operative in enhancing learners’ writing performance in a virtual environment.