Teaching English Language
Volume:7 Issue: 19, Spring and Summer 2013

The ability to speak a foreign language requires more than a mere knowledge of its grammatical and semantic rules. Learners must acquire the knowledge of how native speakers use the language naturally by capitalizing on a wealth of prefabricated forms such as collocations and idioms. Owing to dearth of collocational knowledge, most EFL learners’ oral or written productions are recognized “unnatural” or “strange” by a native speaker. The present study was an attempt to uncover relationship between collocational knowledge and speaking proficiency, collocational knowledge and use of collocations, and also relationship between speaking proficiency and use of collocations. The data for this study came from 30 intermediate Iranian EFL learners who sat a collocation test and were interviewed on a range of topics. The results indicated that there is a significant relationship between collocational knowledge and speaking proficiency and also between speaking proficiency and oral use of collocations. However, no significant relationship was found between collocational knowledge and use of collocations. Further findings of the study as well implications for the teaching and learning of collocations are discussed in the paper.

This study investigated the relative effects of explicit and implicit form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of four simple and difficult morphosyntactic features as assessed by explicit and implicit outcome measures. Four tests were utilized to assess L2 learners'' acquisition: elicited oral imitation, timed and untimed grammaticality judgment, and metalinguistic knowledge tests. A pretest and two posttests were administered to 120 low pre-intermediate learners immediately and three weeks after the instructional treatments. Durable effects of FFI were found for simple and difficult language forms on both measures of explicit and implicit L2 knowledge. More specifically, the present study indicated that explicit FFI was significantly more beneficial for simple language features chosen according to their degree of difficulty based on the explicit knowledge criteria and implicit FFI was significantly more beneficial for simple language features selected according to their degree of difficulty based on the implicit knowledge criteria. The findings may promise implications for our understanding of the efficacy of explicit and implicit FFI on L2 learners’ controlled and spontaneous use of simple and difficult forms at early stages of L2 acquisition.

Drawing mainly on Hyland''s (2005) «interpersonal model of metadiscourse», the researchers in the current study strived to probe the viable impact of consciousness-raising regarding metadiscourse (MD) markers on Iranian EFL learners'' academic writing performance. To this end, 75 university junior students were assigned to three separate groups (two experimental and one control, based on random assignment) and exposed to three different kinds of treatment. While the control group participants followed their normal course of instruction, learners in the explicit instruction group (the first experimental group) were provided with overt guidelines regarding the uses of metadiscourse markers through active involvement with MD-marker detection drills, and the participants in the second experimental group (the implicit instruction group) were just given hints, in a tacit manner, concerning the points at which MD markers occurred within the text (this was done through mere noticing procedure via highlighted text). It is also worth noting that an excerpt from IELTS argumentative writing tasks was used for pre and post testing purposes, and a random selection from the introduction and discussion sections of recently-published articles in peer-reviewed educational and teaching journals was utilized as the treatment material. The final analysis of data through one-way ANOVA and ANCOVA revealed significant differences in the writing performance of three groups of learners involved in the experiment.

The present study aimed to investigate Critical Thinking and Individual Voice in male and female Iranian undergraduate university students'' writings. To this end, a set of literary works studied and discussed during the Introduction to English Literature course were assigned to a group of 60 male and female students to write some essays as their term projects. The essays were scored and evaluated independently by two raters in terms of Stapleton (2001) critical thinking elements including: arguments, reasons, evidences, recognition of oppositions and refutations, fallacies and conclusions. The number of agreed-on elements was divided by the total number of agreements and disagreements and multiplied by 100 to get the percent inter-rater reliability. Regarding Individual voice, the total number of T-units−the main clause and all the dependent clauses in a sentence (Larsen-Freeman and Long, 1991) − An investigation of critical thinking and individual voice and the number of T-units representing «self» were calculated and compared. By dividing the already scored essays into two groups of 15 males and females, the overall performance of males and females on the essays regarding Critical Thinking and Individual Voice were also compared. The results revealed no significant difference between males'' and females'' critical thinking level. In almost all cases, there were a vast number of claims unsupported by logical reasons and evidence from the texts, hasty and irrelevant conclusions, and lots of fallacies which suggest students'' overall tendency to copy what they read rather than evaluating and judging it themselves through logical reasoning. For Individual voice although there appeared to be a better performance of males over females, still the number of T-units representing self was too low in both groups.

Speaking English fluently and accurately is the most important, favorite, and complicated skill for EFL learners. The present study was an attempt to investigate the morphological speaking errors of Iranian EFL learners across proficiency levels and gender. To this end, a corpus of 1399 tokens of speech morphology errors was collected. The learners'' oral production was observed and recorded naturally using various communicative tasks in class. The errors were then detected, transcribed, coded and classified following James (1998) taxonomy of errors. The results represented misselection as the most frequent type at morphology level. The results further showed significant difference between genders in terms of making grammar errors.The findings of this study can provide feedback for English teachers supervisors, and syllabus designers to help EFLlearners develop their intrelanguage knowledge of grammar through revisiting teaching methods and implementing remedial materials.

Collocations have the potential to differentiate native speakers from non-native ones clearly (Nation, 2001). Many studies have explored the effect of different teaching techniques on collocations in the context of concordancing. The present study investigated the influence of concordancing and scaffolding on Iranian intermediate English learners’ use of high CV and low CV collocations. Three experimental groups received a 10-session treatment during which the participants had access to concordancing under symmetrical, asymmetrical, and no-scaffolding conditions. The control group, however, received neither concordancing nor scaffolding. Two parallel sets of story writing and paraphrasing tasks were given in the immediate and delayed posttests to measure the influence of the treatments. Results indicated that the experimental groups outperformed the control group significantly in producing high CV and low CV collocations. However, no statistically significant difference was observed between high CV and low CV collocations as a result of concordancing and scaffolding.