The Effects of Different Task Types on EFL Learners' Acquisition of Two Grammatical Structures (Infinitives and Gerunds): The Case of Iranian High School Students

Abstract

This study was an attempt to investigate the effects of three different task types, that is dictation task, individual reconstruction task, and collaborative reconstruction task on EFL learners' acquisition of two grammatical structures, gerunds and infinitives. These tasks were also accompanied by either explicit or implicit instructions to see whether explicit or implicit instruction was effective and useful in the final achievement of grammatical structures. 40 low-intermediate male High School learners of English in Lordegan, Iran, were selected as the participants of this study. A timed Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) was used for data collection. In order to compare the three groups under the study, both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed. To compare the means, one-way ANOVAs as well as t-test were used. The results of statistical analysis supported this hypothesis that significant differences existed in the performance of three groups of participants when they completed the treatments including dictation, individual reconstruction and collaborative reconstruction. The students who completed the collaborative reconstruction task outperformed the other two groups who completed the dictation task and individual reconstruction task. In addition, dictation group outperformed the individual reconstruction group. Moreover, the difference between explicit and implicit groups was significant. In addition, the explicit group outperformed the implicit group after receiving the special instructions. In other words, the explicit group performed better than the implicit group in acquisition of grammatical structures.