Abstract
The importance of teaching explicit knowledge of grammar has been one of the most controversial issues in L2 instruction. Despite the existence of considerable number of studies on different methods of grammar instruction, very few studies have investigated the role of explicit instruction and input enhancement on developing EFL learners’ explicit knowledge of grammatical structures. Therefore, this study is an attempt to investigate the effects of input enhancement and explicit instruction on developing Iranian EFL learners’ explicit knowledge of simple present and simple past passive voice. To this end, 48 lower- intermediate EFL students participated in the present research and a pretest-posttest quasi experimental design with two experimental groups and a control group was adopted. While the participants in the explicit instruction group received explicit instruction on selected passive forms, those in the enhanced input received the same passages but the target passive forms were enhanced via bolding and underlining, and the control group received the same texts but in the original form with no enhancement or explicit instruction. To measure participants’ explicit knowledge of the target passive voice, two valid measures including untimmed grammaticality judgement test (UGJT) and metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT) were used. One-way ANOVA results indicated the superiority of the explicit instruction in developing explicit knowledge of passive voice. The findings have some pedagogical implications for EFL teachers and material developers.
Highlights
A large body of research has been done to address the role of instruction in second/ foreign language (L2/Second/ foreign language (FL)) learning; the effectiveness of instruction in L2/FL learning has been controversial (Ellis, 2005)
The present study investigated the effect of two types of treatments, namely explicit instruction and input enhancement on developing explicit knowledge of two types of passive voice, namely simple present and simple past
The results revealed that input enhancement brought about improvements in the participants’ explicit knowledge of the target structures compared to the control group
Summary
A large body of research has been done to address the role of instruction in second/ foreign language (L2/FL) learning; the effectiveness of instruction in L2/FL learning has been controversial (Ellis, 2005). The results of a large body of research conducted within second language acquistion (SLA) have revealed that the right kind of instruction is effective in promoting the acquisition of an L2 (Doughty, 2008). According to Richards and Rodgers (2014), teaching English, as a foreign language has always been a controversial issue. In this regard, the extent to which teachers and language practitioners need to draw learners’ attention to the linguistic forms has always arisen considerable controversy. The reason that language practitioners recommend instructional techniques that improve SLA is that learners do not always pay attention to what they need in the input (Wong, 2005)
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