The study was an attempt to examine the effects of three types of written corrective feedback namely direct, indirect, and metalinguistic, and the related responses (with and without revision) on the production of grammatical structures by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. 180 language learners were chosen out of a population pool of 260 participants and assigned to six groups of 30 learners based on their performance on Oxford Quick Placement Test (QPT): DCF with and without revision, ICF with and without revision, MCF with and without revision. Provided with different types of feedback, the students in any of six experimental groups were given instruction on present and past perfect tenses. A pre-test -post-test design was applied to conduct the study. Participants in each group were required to take Dicto-Comp as a pre-test. After being offered with the relevant treatments, a parallel post-test was run. The results showed that students in all experimental groups outperformed their knowledge of present/past perfect tenses from the pre-test to the post-test. Students in the ‘DCF with revision’ outperformed all other groups, and the groups required to make revisions (i.e., DCF / ICF / MCF with revision) outperformed the corresponding groups with no revision, and the only groups whose scores (between pre-test and post-test) showed more variation were MCF with and without revision. The results provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of teacher feedback on L2 writing ability at large and learning these two tenses at least for the participants of the present study. Furthermore, these results suggested that providing written corrective feedback can be beneficial as an enhancing element in the curriculum development for improving EFL learners’ writing ability.
Month : February 2022
Instagram-Assisted Learning of Collocations and Colligations: The Case of EFL Learners
Instagram, as a popular social networking platform, allows users to share photos and videos with other users. This research investigated the effect of Instagram-assisted instruction on the learning of collocations and colligations by Iranian EFL learners. Fifteen participants who were selected based on a language proficiency test took part in this research. The participants were first pre-tested on their collocational and colligational knowledge. The collocational and colligational items that were answered incorrectly by 50 percent or higher were selected for treatment. Afterwards, the researchers prepared nine videos, containing 41 collocational and colligational items, and posted them on Instagram during a five- week instruction period. The participants were asked to watch the videos, and carry out the related exercises in the caption section of the post, through the usage of the comments sections on Instagram. After posting all the videos, the pre-test was run again as a post-test. The results indicated a significant difference between the mean scores of the pre- and post-test, highlighting the fact that the treatment had been effective. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 participants in order to find out their attitudes towards language learning via Instagram. The learners indicated a positive attitude towards using Instagram for their language learning purposes. In conclusion, the research showed that Instagram-assisted instruction, when properly implemented and designed, can be beneficial to the development of second language learning.