Hossein Younesi; Zia Tajeddin
Volume 10, Issue 22 , December 2018, , Pages 113-139
Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the impact of textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation as focus-on-form tasks tending to encourage the acquisition of nominal clauses (NCs) in English. It explored (a) whether textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation would promote and enhance the knowledge ...
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This study aimed to investigate the impact of textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation as focus-on-form tasks tending to encourage the acquisition of nominal clauses (NCs) in English. It explored (a) whether textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation would promote and enhance the knowledge of NCs, (b) whether these two tasks would differ in terms of enhancing learners' knowledge of nominal clauses, and (c) whether learners' use of self-regulatory capacity for grammar acquisition would have differential effects on textual enhancement and explicit explanation groups. A test of recognizing noun clauses and a test of producing combined sentences were used as both the pretest and the posttest to measure the achievement of first-year undergraduate university students in four intact classes. A grammar self-regulation questionnaire was also administered to measure the use of self-regulatory capacity. The findings demonstrated that both textual enhancement and explicit instruction contributed to developing grammatical knowledge of the learners at both recognition and production level. The results also showed that the learners who received textual enhancement used their grammar self-regulatory capacity more effectively in developing their receptive knowledge of NCs. It can be concluded that textual enhancement, which provides learners with less explicit instruction, pushes them to use their self-regulatory capacity more effectively in improving receptive knowledge of grammar.
Zia Tajeddin; Elham Yazdanmehr
Volume 4, Issue 10 , March 2013, , Pages 27-51
Abstract
This study aims to delve into the unobservable dimensions of deciding and acting in a pragmatically significant speech event. Utilizing a Discourse Completion Test questionnaire, it seeks to find out the structure and pragmatic functions that lie behind EFL learners’ choice of specific wording ...
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This study aims to delve into the unobservable dimensions of deciding and acting in a pragmatically significant speech event. Utilizing a Discourse Completion Test questionnaire, it seeks to find out the structure and pragmatic functions that lie behind EFL learners’ choice of specific wording while engaged in performing a recurrent speech act in Iran i.e. compliments. To this aim, 30 EFL learners were requested to self-assess their performance in a number of presumed situations in which they were required to make compliments to different addressees. The participants were adult intermediate EFL learners in 18-35 range of age. They were of both sexes and studied English between 1.5 to 5 years. To complete the tasks, they both made notes of their responses and uttered out simultaneously why they complimented in a certain way. Their responses along with transcriptions of their recorded think-aloud protocols were subsequently analyzed in this paper as for their structures and pragmatic functions according to Manes & Wolfson (1981), and Brown & Levinson (1987).
