Investigating the Short-term and Long-term Effects of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) on Iranian Arabic Learners’ Grammatical Competence

The present study was aimed at investigating the short-term and long-term impact of teaching Arabic tenses to Iranian Arabic learners through TBLT. The research enjoyed a quasi-experimental design. Eighty eleventh-grade male (N=40) and female (N=40) high school students majoring in Persian Literature and Humanities in Felavarjan, Isfahan comprised the study sample. Eight Arabic tenses including simple past, present perfect, continuous past, past perfect, subjective past, simple present, subjective present, and simple future in addition to their negative forms were instructed to the students in the control and experimental groups. The tenses were taught by the grammar-translation method (GTM) to the control group. On the other hand, the experimental group received instruction in the tenses via TBLT. The grammar test devised by the researchers was administered ahead of, immediately after, and three weeks after the instruction. The scores of the students in both groups significantly increased in the post-test and delayed-post-test. However, the experimental group had signiciantly superior performance in both tests particularly in case of more complex structures. The results point to the statistically significant impact of TBLT in the short and long run which could be attributed to its communicative and real-life nature. The findings suggest that this recent method is effective in teaching Arabic.