چکیده:
The present study was designed to investigate the impact of applying fill-in-the-map and construct-a-map techniques on EFL learners’ knowledge of tenses. To this end, sixty EFL elementary female students, who were selected based on their performance on a standardized teacher-made proficiency test, were randomly assigned into two equal experimental and control groups. In order to be convinced of their homogeneity in terms of knowledge of tenses, a researcher-made test of grammar on tenses was administered to the participants in both groups. As the results showed no significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups on this test, they were regarded to be homogeneous in that respect. Students in both groups received the same amount and method of instruction but they differed in the practice phase. The participants in the experimental group used fill-in-the-map and construct-a-map techniques, but those in the control group did not practice these techniques and worked on the textbook exercises and some "find the error" activities instead. At the end of the instruction, an independent samples t-test was run for the obtained means of the experimental and control groups on a researcher-made posttest on the knowledge of tenses. The results showed that there was a significant difference between their mean scores on the test. Thus, it could be concluded that applying fill-in-the-map and construct-a-map techniques was effective in the improvement of EFL learners’ knowledge of tenses.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"ABSTRACT: Keywords: concept mapping, construct-a-map technique, fill-in-the-map technique, knowledge of tenses No area of second and foreign language learning has been the subject of as much empirical and practical interest as grammar teaching.
According to Ruiz-Primo and Shavelson (1996) concept mapping has different techniques, which are based on variation in tasks that invite students to provide evidence bearing on their knowledge structure in a content domain, a format for a student’s response, and a scoring system by which the student’s concept map can be evaluated accurately and consistently.
According to Novak (2001), concept mapping can be used for several purposes: To generate ideas (brainstorming) To design complex structures (long texts, hypermedia, large web sites) To communicate complex ideas To aid learning by explicitly integrating new and old knowledge To assess understanding or diagnose misunderstanding Fill-in-the-map Technique The fill-in-the-map technique provides students with a concept map where some of the concepts or the linking words have been left out.
To select the subjects of the study and to minimize the individual differences among them, a school-made proficiency test after being piloted with 30 students possessing similar characteristics, was administered as a standard criterion to help the researchers to choose as homogenous a sample as possible.
Procedure To accomplish the purpose of the study, the following procedures were carried out: As the first stage, a school-made proficiency test was piloted with 30 students having similar characteristics to those of the target group and then it was administered to 90 elementary Iranian EFL learners in order to choose a homogeneous sample from among them."