The effect of task-based instruction on the acquisition and use of English existential constructions by Iranian EFL learners

Abstract

This study sought to measure the degree of students’ success in learning and proper use of Existential Constructions (ECs), namely there is/are, in English as a foreign language through Focus on Form (FonF) techniques in Task-based language teaching. For this purpose, 60 Iranian learners of English were randomly selected and assigned to one experimental and two control groups. Analysis of the results of the posttests revealed a positive effect for FonF Task-based instruction, thus confirming the first hypothesis regarding the effect of FonF on the participants’ successful acquisition and effective use of ECs in English. The results further confirmed the second hypothesis regarding the enhanced effect of FonF over more traditional methods’ strategies for the instruction and acquisition of particularly difficult grammatical features in a foreign language. The study also revealed that input enhancement alone does not guarantee learners’ success in acquiring and using foreign language structural elements. The results of the study also carry a number of implications that would be helpful for teachers and practitioners in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) contexts.

Keywords:

• existential constructions (ECs)
• focus on form (FonF) tasks
• Persian
• second/foreign language learning (S/FLL)
• tasks
• task-based language teaching (TBLT)
• English as a foreign language (EFL)
• task-based approach

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous ILLT reviewers for their careful reading of the first draft of this article. Without their invaluable (as well as highly encouraging) comments, the article would not have looked as neatly organized as it possibly does. All shortcomings remain solely ours.

Notes

1. Although various studies have attempted to tackle these questions in the last two decades (Doughty 2003; Lightbown and Spada 1990), Brown (2007) still contends that there exist many more ‘linguistic features in a language and … many potential contexts of learning’ (279) that need to be explored before one could attempt a thorough answer to such questions (see Shehadeh 2005 and Willis 2005 for more recent accounts).

2. We did not find any definitive research account of second language problems in this respect, but it would certainly be interesting to see how learners of English with a partial pro-drop mother tongue would behave in their learning and use of English ECs.

3. It is interesting to note that the problem with ECs could also occur in the case of children learning English as their mother tongue. A study by Kirby and Becker (2007) has shown that children produce deictic and anaphoric pronoun it from the very first stages of research while do not produce expletive it until 2–7 months later.

4. We made sure learners were homogeneous with regard to their level of English proficiency based on their scores from the placement test and the pretest. We also controlled for their exposure to English by excluding learners who reported travel to an English-speaking country or participation in other simultaneous courses of instruction. Moreover, in Iran where English instruction begins at first grade secondary school (age 11) and formally ends at first degree university graduation (typically age 23), students are only exposed to a limited reading knowledge of English and do not go beyond to attaining any communicative proficiency in use.

5. All three groups went through an equal amount of exposure and were only different in the teaching method through which they received their relative instruction. (Thanks to an ILLT reviewer for bringing this to our attention.)

6. Note that private language schools work independently of ordinary public schools in Iran.

7. It was arranged for the posttest to be more extensive to ensure greater reliability in terms of participant responses as well as a lower risk of possible accidental or guessed answers.

8. It is important to note that the delayed posttest did not intend to determine ‘retention’ of the material taught in any way as this was not a goal of the present study. It was only included to have a more comprehensive picture of the actual use of the target structure in both written and spoken form. We were obliged to administer one of the two tests with a time interval only to follow local institute regulations.

9. Thanks to an ILLT reviewer for suggesting the incorporation of this ‘all groups’ summary table.

10. In private institutes in Iran, many teachers intuitively assume that an eclectic approach, a juicy mixture of various activity types from a variety of methods, would yield greater efficiency in teaching different language features and structures than relying on a single approach like TBLT (Atai and Gheitanchian 2009). Nevertheless, this is only intuitive and thorough action-based research is required to compare the results to see any superior positive outcomes.

11. Thanks to an ILLT reviewer for pointing out this limitation of the present study.