output tasks

In an attempt to contribute to the ongoing debate about how output tasks affect noticing of linguistic forms, the present study set out to investigate the effect of pushed output tasks on grammatical accuracy in sentence writing of Iranian EFL learners. Fifty homogenous Iranian EFL learners were randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. Then, every group underwent ten different treatment sessions. The control group received writing instruction through conventional methods, while the experimental group received instruction through two pushed output tasks. In the case of the experimental group, in the first five treatment sessions, four grammatical structures were presented through picture cued tasks. The next five treatment sessions directed at other structures took place via reconstruction tasks. Two different versions of the writing section of the Preliminary English Test (PET) were used as pre/post-test. The results indicated that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group. Therefore, it might be argued that pushed output-based tasks had a positive effect on the Iranian EFL learner’s grammatical accuracy in sentence writing. These findings provide empirical support for the output hypothesis and have pedagogical implications for the choice of output-oriented grammar tasks.

The present study was conducted to investigate the impact of collaborative output tasks on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ knowledge of active/passive voice. The main question this study tried to investigate was whether there would be any significant difference between the means of the two participant groups in a grammar posttest if the groups were taught with two different teaching methods. The participants of the study comprised 40 EFL learners. They were divided into two experimental and control groups. Each group consists of 20 participants. The control group received the traditional treatment while the experimental group was taught active/passive voice through collaborative output tasks. Two similar tests were prepared as the pretest and posttest to measure the students’ active/passive voice knowledge at the beginning and end of the study. To analyze the data, a series of paired sample t-tests and independent sample t-tests were run. The results showed that participants in the experimental group had a better performance than the control group. Consequently, it was concluded that the utilization of collaborative output tasks in teaching active/passive voice led to a higher level of knowledge improvement.