مطالب

With the aim of more emphasis on pragmatics and its inclusion in EFL classrooms, this study attempted to investigate the effectiveness of obtrusive and unobtrusive focus on form instructions on learners’ pragmatic performance of criticizing in English. 54 Iranian learners, all at intermediate level, participated in this study, and they were divided into three groups: 19 participants receiving obtrusive instruction, 21 learners receiving unobtrusive instruction and 14 participants had no pragmatic instruction (control group). Techniques related to each method were operationalized in details and applied in the classrooms. The most basic techniques in obtrusive methods were consciousness raising activities, metalinguistic explanation, and explicit correction. In unobtrusive method, input enhancement activities, and recast were used. Discourse completion test and oral feedback were used as pretests and posttests in this study. After applying statistical analyses using ANOVA, it was found that learners’ pragmatic knowledge of criticizing improved significantly in both kinds of instructions. Also, results of post hoc analyses indicated that learners in obtrusive focus on form instruction outperformed those in unobtrusive focus on form instruction significantly. These results were justified through noticing hypotheses, importance of metalinguistic explanations, effects of explicit correction, and output hypothesis. These findings may have great implications for language teachers, syllabus designers, and future researchers.

This paper examines the effect of gender and type of stem on Iranian test takers’ performance on the grammar section of a nation-wide language proficiency test. In so doing, the scores of 2931 examinees (1107 female and 1824 male) who sat Tarbiat Modares English proficiency test were obtained. The examinees’ scores on three types of MC grammar items with different kinds of stems (i.e., blank filling, error recognition, and cloze) were compared to see if the type of stem has any effect on performance. Grammar scores of males and females were also compared to see if there is an effect for gender on the examinees’ performance on the grammar test in general and on its three item types in particular. The results indicated that test takers performed better on cloze items than the other two types. It was also found that females outperformed males on both the whole test, and also on items with blank filling and cloze types of stems. Due to the particularity of the context and the small effect sizes found, the study calls for more research to be conducted on this topic.