output-based instruction

The use of task-based collaborative output activities in enhancing EFL students’ writing proficiency has been underrated in the Iranian context. To foster students’ writing ability, the present study, employing a mixed-methods design, aimed to evaluate the effect of innovative tools, dictogloss and debating, on the writing development of English-major university students in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). The study involved two experimental extracurricular classes and consisted of 11 sessions during the regular academic term. Having analyzed the writing tasks produced by the students’ performance on pre-test and post-test, the researcher found that the students of both groups significantly enhanced their writing performance, representing an increase in a number of indices of CAF measures following the intervention. More specifically, the results of a paired-samples t-test confirmed that the students in the dictogloss group showed significant improvement in six indices of CAF measure, and the students in the debate group displayed significant improvement in seven indices of CAF measures. Moreover, the results of ANCOVA confirmed that the debate group improved more than the dictogloss group in terms of CAF measures. The results of the interviews with the students regarding the role of task-based collaborative output activities in their written performance yielded several commonalities, which were coded into 11 codes for dictogloss and 16 codes for debating, taking inter-coder reliability and agreement into account. In the end, the study offers some practical implications for L2 learners and teachers.

This study investigated the differential impacts of the structured input (SI) and output-based instruction (OI) taskson the improvement of the receptive and productive knowledge of request modifiers. Eighty-three EFL learners were randomly assigned to the SI, OI, and control groupsthrough a quasi-experimental research design. Over a 5-week course, the explicit metapragmatic instruction on the target structures was delivered to all the groups; however, whereas the SI group was exposed to the SI tasks, the OI group was engaged in the dialogue-reconstruction task. Results of ANCOVA and paired comparisons showed the effectiveness of both instructions on L2 pragmatic knowledge. Whereas the SI was more effective in fostering the receptive knowledge of the target structures, the OI better improved the productive knowledge. Moreover, the comprehension gains were not retained in the follow-up test, but the production gains appeared to be durable between the posttest and the follow-up test.

The studies on the merits of processing instruction (PI) and output-based instruction (OI) have mostly treated the two approaches as mutually exclusive. To address the potentials of combining interpretation and production activities, this research compared the two isolated approaches of PI and OI with two combined approaches in which processing and output tasks were used in two opposite orders suggested by the researcher, i.e.  processing-output-based instruction (POI) and output-processing-based instruction (OPI). The target structure was English passives. Participants included 185 Iranian EFL students from five intact classes, with four assigned to each treatment and one comprising a control group. Results on sentence-level interpretation and production tests administered before, immediately after, and one month following instruction indicated similar improvement for the treatment groups on the first interpretation posttest, and the superiority of POI over OPI and PI over the delayed posttest. On the first production test, POI, OPI, and OI performed equally well and better than PI, while more accurate uses of the target form were observed by POI and OPI on the delayed posttest. It was concluded that the combined approaches, particularly POI, could produce more persistent outcomes by giving learners the opportunity to both process a form and produce it.

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of input-enhancement and production of sentences, containing the target structures, on learning grammar by Iranian Intermediate EFL learners. Sixty male students in three input, output, and control groups participated in the study. After checking the homogeneity of the participants with a proficiency test, the researchers administered a pretest. Input-based group received input enhancement within reading texts in which the target structures were highlighted with different techniques such as bolding and underlying. The output-based group were required to produce some sentences including target structures based on reading texts. The control group received traditional grammar instruction. The results of ANCOVA revealed that both experimental groups learned the target structures better than the control group; however, the input-based group outperformed output-based group in learning target grammatical structures. The findings of the study suggest the widespread use of input-enhancement, as one of the techniques of focus on form, plays a significant role in enhancing grammatical accuracy.

Mainstream L2 pragmatic research has shown that pragmatic fossilization is quite common among L2 learners at almost all levels of proficiency. This study examined the defossilizing effect of corpus-driven activities on 10 situationally-based pragmatic routines under two instructional conditions, i.e. input-based and output-based treatments. Participants were 33 advanced EFL learners in two classes in a private English language center. They received instruction in four sessions across two weeks. Before and after the treatment, a WDCT was administered for pretest and posttest purposes. The results of paired-samples and Independent Samples t-tests showed that input-enhancement and output-based instructions were effective in defossilization pragmatic routines which had a strong fossilization tendency among learners. Both treatment tasks led to significant increases in learners’ comprehension and production of the routines. The output-based group; however, significantly outperformed the input-based group in the production of the routines. The findings indicate that pragmatic instruction can debilitate the fossilization tendencies of pragmatic routines and that different instructional tasks have differential effects on the production and comprehension of pragmatic routines. The pedagogical implication of this study is that a combination of instructionally supported corpus-based tasks would be effective for enhancing EFL learners’ ability to comprehend and use routines appropriately in context.