Masood Esteki; Mansoor Tavakoli; Mohammad Amiryousefi
Abstract
This study sought to investigate the effects of Explicit Instruction in combination with Input Enhancement (EI+IE), Input Flood (IF), and Gap-fill (GF) tasks on receptive and productive knowledge of English formulaic sequences (FS) by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Assigned to ...
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This study sought to investigate the effects of Explicit Instruction in combination with Input Enhancement (EI+IE), Input Flood (IF), and Gap-fill (GF) tasks on receptive and productive knowledge of English formulaic sequences (FS) by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Assigned to three experimental groups, the 110 participants took the receptive and productive knowledge pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests. Findings of within-group (repeated-measures ANOVAs) and between-group (ANCOVAs) tests showed that while IF could not promote learners' performance, both the EI+IE and the GF could improve learners’ receptive and productive knowledge of target FSs from pretests to posttests and retained the effects until the delayed posttests. Additionally, both EI+IE and GF groups significantly outperformed the IF group at the immediate posttests. That is, the results from EI+IE did not differ significantly from those of GF. Plausible accounts for the obtained results are provided and the implications are discussed.
Mohammad Afshar Rad; Aram Reza Sadeghi Benis
Volume 6, Issue 13 , September 2014, , Pages 1-14
Abstract
A large number of studies dealing with phonology have focused their attention on phonological production at the expense of phonological perception which provides the foundation stone for phonological production. This study focuses on phonological perception at phonemic level. The purpose of the study ...
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A large number of studies dealing with phonology have focused their attention on phonological production at the expense of phonological perception which provides the foundation stone for phonological production. This study focuses on phonological perception at phonemic level. The purpose of the study is helping beginning learners improve their perception of the English phonemes which are confusable for them. To this end, we propose transcribing as an aural input enhancement device and examine its effect on learners’ phonemic perception. Thirty one females who were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups participated in this study. The experimental group had transcribing exercise during the experiment while the control group did not. The results of the study show that transcribing improves beginning learners’ phonemic perception significantly. Therefore, EFL teachers are advised to include transcribing exercise as one of the techniques to improve learners’ phonemic perception and, hence, their listening comprehension.
Sasan Baleghizadeh; Arash Saharkhiz
Volume 5, Issue 12 , December 2013, , Pages 17-41
Abstract
This study was inspired by VanPatten and Uludag’s (2011) study on the transferability of training via processing instruction to output tasks and Mori’s (2002) work on the development of talk-in-interaction during a group task. An interview was devised as the pretest, posttest, and delayed ...
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This study was inspired by VanPatten and Uludag’s (2011) study on the transferability of training via processing instruction to output tasks and Mori’s (2002) work on the development of talk-in-interaction during a group task. An interview was devised as the pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest to compare four intervention types for teaching the simple past passive: traditional intervention as the comparison group and three task-based groups were processing instruction, consciousness-raising, and input enhancement. The interviews and the interactions during the treatments were also analyzed qualitatively. Task-based instruction (TBI) proved significantly more effective than traditional intervention and processing instruction significantly outperformed all others on both posttests. Furthermore, processing instruction was the only task-based intervention to retain its improvement till the delayed posttest. Qualitatively, processing instruction led to true negotiation of meaning and deep-level learning, consciousness-raising led to massive negotiation over the function of the target structure and deep-level learning, input enhancement led to enormous unfocused interaction about meaning, and traditional intervention just led to interaction about the forms. It was concluded that a well-planned processing instruction is a promising intervention for focusing on language form; however, due to the strong points cited for the other two tasks, their roles should not be ignored.
