The Impact of Focused and Unfocused Tasks on University Students' Grammatical Achievement

Abstract

The educational system in teaching English has always been seeking the best procedure to improve learners grammatical competence The focus of this study is to find an answer to the following questions: Do focused tasks affect grammatical achievement?; Do unfocused tasks affect grammatical achievement of the students? ; Does traditional method affect grammatical achievement of students?; and is there a significant difference in the grammatical achievement of the students among focused tasks unfocused task, and control group? Subjects in this study were 60 freshman students majoring in English translation, including 41females and 19 males studying in Lahijan IAU. The subjects were at the age range of 19 to 22. After administrating Nelson B1 test to be sure whether the participants are homogenous, the researchers employed the Opt test; then 60 students out of 146 students studying English translation at Lahijan Islamic Azad university were selected. The result of the study indicated that the performance of the students using focused task outweighed the students using focused task outweighed the other two groups experiencing unfocused task and traditional task in terms of grammar. Moreover, the experimental group B (i.e, unfocused task) performed almost identical to the experimental group A (i.e, focused tasks). In a nutshell, the control group performance was statistically different from the other two groups.