productive knowledge

This study sought to investigate the effects of Explicit ‎Instruction in combination with Input ‎Enhancement (EI+IE), Input Flood (IF), and Gap-fill (GF) tasks on receptive and productive ‎knowledge of English formulaic sequences (FS) ‎by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Assigned ‎to three experimental groups‎, the 110 participants took the receptive and productive knowledge ‎pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests. Findings of within-group (repeated-‎measures ‎ANOVAs) and between-group (ANCOVAs) tests showed that while IF could not promote ‎learners' performance, both the EI+IE and the GF could ‎improve learners’ receptive and ‎productive knowledge of target ‎FSs from pretests to posttests and ‎retained the effects until the ‎delayed posttests. Additionally, both EI+IE and GF groups ‎significantly outperformed the IF ‎group at the immediate posttests. That is, the results from EI+IE did not differ significantly from ‎those of GF. Plausible accounts for the obtained results are provided and the implications are ‎discussed.‎

This study aimed to investigate the impact of textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation as focus-on-form tasks tending to encourage the acquisition of nominal clauses (NCs) in English. It explored (a) whether textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation would promote and enhance the knowledge of NCs, (b) whether these two tasks would differ in terms of enhancing learners' knowledge of nominal clauses, and (c) whether learners' use of self-regulatory capacity for grammar acquisition would have differential effects on textual enhancement and explicit explanation groups. A test of recognizing noun clauses and a test of producing combined sentences were used as both the pretest and the posttest to measure the achievement of first-year undergraduate university students in four intact classes. A grammar self-regulation questionnaire was also administered to measure the use of self-regulatory capacity. The findings demonstrated that both textual enhancement and explicit instruction contributed to developing grammatical knowledge of the learners at both recognition and production level. The results also showed that the learners who received textual enhancement used their grammar self-regulatory capacity more effectively in developing their receptive knowledge of NCs. It can be concluded that textual enhancement, which provides learners with less explicit instruction, pushes them to use their self-regulatory capacity more effectively in improving receptive knowledge of grammar.

The current second language (L2) instruction research has raised great motivation for the use of both processing instruction and meaningful output instruction tasks in L2 classrooms as the two focus-on-form (FonF) instructional tasks. The present study investigated the effect of structured input tasks (represented by referential and affective tasks) compared with meaningful output tasks (implemented through text reconstruction cloze tasks) on the acquisition of English nominal clauses (NCs). The study sought to investigate if (1) both input and output instruction would lead to significant gains of knowledge in acquiring NCs, and (2) there were any significant differences between learners'' receptive and productive knowledge of nominal clauses. First-year undergraduate students studying at four intact university classrooms participated in the study. The effectiveness of the tasks was determined by a noun-clause recognition test and a sentence combination production test administered both as the pretest and posttest. The results revealed that both processing instruction and meaningful output instruction helped the learners improve their receptive knowledge of grammar effectively; nevertheless, the processing instruction group did not significantly outperform the meaningful output group in their gains of receptive knowledge of grammar. The findings further illustrated that meaningful output instruction group significantly outperformed processing instruction group in their productive knowledge of grammar.