Abstract:
Indubitably, the efficacy of metalinguistic awareness in improving EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge and writing quality has long been an area of great interest in applied linguistics Brown (2001). Accordingly, the main objective of the present study was to investigate the impact of planned and unplanned focus on form instruction on students’ ability to learn grammar and use it appropriately in their writing. For this purpose three intact classes registering for the Grammar and Writing course in university of Isfahan ,Iran were chosen for teaching the target structure (i.e., transitional devices) through different methods of focusing on form instructions. The selected samples comprised 30 in each group, male and female sophomore students with the age range of 19 to 24, studying English translation at university of Isfahan. The samples received instruction through planned focus on form instruction (PFFI), unplanned focus on form instruction (UFFI) and zero focus on form instruction (ZFFI) respectively. The results of the post-test on paragraph writing and on the subsequent delayed post-test revealed that the participants in the planned group notably out performed those in the unplanned and zero focus on form groups in handling transitional markers in the writing of paragraphs.
Machine summary:
Unplanned Focus on Form Instruction in Scaffolding Transitional Devices Used by Iranian EFL Learners in Writing Paragraphs Azizollah Dabaghi Assistant Professor, University of İsfahan (Corresponding author) Elahe Ghorbanchian Ph. D.
Accordingly, the main objective of the present study was to investigate the impact of planned and unplanned focus on form instruction on students’ ability to learn grammar and use it appropriately in their writing.
For example, Ruhi (2001) in a study investigated the effect of explicit and implicit focus on form reinforced by incidental recast on second language development on 72 adult learners.
The researcher wanted to understand if the degree of explicitness influence the learning of the target structure, to answer these questions, the researcher randomly selected 42 EFL participants in 2 universities in Washington; he distributed the learners into 4 groups and randomly assigned four learning conditions: textual enhancement, role-oriented, content-oriented and non-treatment of grammar teaching in the control group.
On this basis, the following questions were addressed in this study: 1) Does explicit or planned focus on form instruction improve the accurate use of transitional expressions in the paragraph writing of Iranian EFL learners?
2) To what extent can implicit or unplanned focus on form instruction improve the accurate use of transitional expressions in paragraph writing of Iranian EFL learners?
In general, the results of most studies point to the notion that explicit teaching of target forms has a powerful impact on the improvement of L2 grammar by learners of English as a foreign language.