Autonomously Noticing Incorrect Language Use: Does it Improve EFL Learners' Grammatical Accuracy?

Abstract

Promoting communicative interactions, while simultaneously drawing students’ attention to language form, is considered as a potentially significant area of research in second language acquisition. This study focuses on the effect of transcribing task, as an autonomous noticing activity, on intermediate and advanced EFL learners' grammatical accuracy. The study was conducted in two advanced and two intermediate adult EFL classrooms, with one class in each level of proficiency serving as the control group and the other as the experimental group. Every session, over a period of 20 weeks, a classroom oral discussion task was assigned to both intermediate and advanced learners. For this purpose, learners were divided into groups of three or four in each class. Students were asked to record their groups' conversations each session. Students in the control groups gave their recorded conversations to the teacher without any post-task activity. Unlike the control groups, the students in the experimental groups were engaged in the post-task activity. Working individually, learners in the experimental groups first transcribed the recorded classroom speaking task and autonomously tried to find and correct their own and their peers' grammatical errors. Subsequently, working collaboratively, learners were engaged in further discussion and reformulation of these inaccurate utterances. The results obtained from one-way ANOVA indicated that transcription of oral output with a follow up self and peer correction significantly enhanced the accuracy of EFL learners’ oral production.