مطالب

The current study, setting a two-fold goal, attempted to see whether the preemptive focus on form (FonF) under either planned or unplanned conditions could contribute to increasing lexical diversity in written narratives and, second, to find whether there was a trade-off between the lexical diversity and accuracy. To this end, 32 beginner learners were selected following a Quick Oxford Placement Test and assigned into two groups to receive preemptive FonF under no-planning and pre-task planning conditions. The analysis of the results through a set ofrepeated measure ANOVAs and independent-samples t-tests revealed that the first group with unplanned condition outperformed the one with pre-task planning in lexical diversity. The results also revealed the trade-off between the lexical diversity and accuracy. That is, both lexical diversity and accuracy were significantly taken care of under unplanned preemptive condition whereas pre-task planning hindered attendingto lexical diversity and, thus, both aspects simultaneously. It was concluded that providing learners with appropriate conditions through form-focused instruction can set the ground for activating their linguistic knowledge and letting them attend to different linguistic aspects during writing.

Inspired by Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory (SCT), the current study intended to investigate the effect of summary training (i.e., oral and written) on intermediate EFL learners’ reading comprehension in different conditions (i.e., individual and collaborative). Data collection tools and procedures encompassed PET test, First Certificate in English (FCE) reading pre-test, and post-test. First, to ensure that the instruments, scoring, as well as summary training procedures were reliable, the researchers conducted a pilot test. During the main study, 120 Iranian EFL intermediate male and female learners aged from 16-18 were considered as the main participants. Learners were divided into 6 groups (i.e., three individual and three collaborative conditions). Furthermore, each condition included three groups with oral summary, written summary groups, and no summary group. A post-test followed the treatment that lasted for 6 sessions. A series of ANOVA with follow up pair-wise comparisons and a series of independent-samples t-tests indicated that: (1) summary training, especially the oral one, was more effective in enhancing the EFL learners’ reading comprehension, and (2) members of the collaborative groups outperformed the members of the individual groups regarding their reading comprehension development. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed concerning enhancing the EFL learners’ reading comprehension.

This study compared the effects of teacher-provided written corrective feedback and manipulation of resource-directing dimensions of task cognitive-complexity along +/- Here and Now condition on the grammatical accuracy of Iranian EFL learners’ writing products. There were 45 participants in the study who were randomly assigned to three experimental groups. All the participants were first given a prompt for the pre-test of writing, and then each group received its own intervention (direct written corrective feedback, indirect written corrective feedback, and task manipulation) for four sessions during four weeks. Subsequently, all the groups took the pre-test prompt of writing for their post-test performance after which the data were collected for the statistical analyses and fed into SPSS. The findings of the study confirmed the significant effects of direct written corrective feedback on increasing the grammatical accuracy of learners’ writings. There were implications, then, based on the results, highlighting the role of meaningful context of task application in the classroom.

The present study was undertaken to investigate the effects of varying frequency patterns (FPs) of words on the productive acquisition of a young EFL learner in a home setting. Target words were presented to the learner using games and role plays. They were subsequently traced for their frequencies in input and output. Eighteen immediate tests and delayed tests were administered to measure the oral production following the treatments. To examine the efficacy of varying FPs, target words were grouped into four sets: High Input/High Output (HIHO), Low Input/Low Output (LILO), High Input/Low Output (HILO), and Low Input/High Output (LIHO). The findings revealed that the differences among the FPs were statistically significant. Meanwhile, Wilcoxon signed-rank test identified a significant discrepancy between the words with LILO and HIHO frequency patterns. The findings demonstrated that the differences in FPs led to different productive gains, and higher word production cropped up when words occurred very frequently both in input and output. This study shows that higher teacher talk in tandem with higher learner talk could boost lexical production by a young learner in meaning-focused instructions.