Abstract:
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.
Machine summary:
It explored (a) whether textual enhancement and metalinguistic explanation would promote and enhance theknowledge 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 ontextual enhancement and explicit explanation groups.
com <H4>Introduction</H4> Although there are various theoretical and empirical perspectives on the nature of different types of form-focused instruction, including textually enhanced input instruction and metalinguistic, explicit instruction, the importance of their roles in second language acquisition (SLA) cannot be disputed (Nassaji &amp; Fotos, 2011).
Many studies have investigated the effectiveness of metalinguistic explanation in a combination with input processing or meaningful production tasks (DeKeyser, 1995; Ellis, Loewen, &amp; Erlam, 2006; Fernández, 2008; Henry, Culman, &amp; VanPatten, 2009; Morgan-Short, Sanz, Steinhauer, &amp; Ullman, 2010; VanPatten &amp; Oikkenon, 1996).
In this study, the first research question addressed the effect of the textual enhancement, explicit instruction, and conventional instruction on EFL learners' receptive and productive knowledge of NCs. The results of the t-test analysis demonstrated that the mean differences between the pretest and posttest for the three groups were statistically significant.
The second purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in the learners' receptive and productive knowledge of NCs between textual enhancement and explicit instruction groups.
Research in second language acquisition shows that focus-on-form approaches to grammar instruction attempt to draw learners' attention to form by manipulating communicative tasks in the classroom context (Doughty &amp; Williams, 1998; Swain, 1995, 1998, 2005).