Textual Enhancement and Input Processing Effects on the Intake of Present and Past Simple Tenses

摘要

The present study was conducted to measure the effects of Textual Enhancement (TE) and Input Processing (IP) as two types of treatment versus Traditional Instruction (TI) as a controlling context for fulfilling the objectives of focus on form to teach present and past simple tenses. To this end, six junior high-school classes with 139 Iranian male students were chosen using cluster sampling. Sixty six of them were studying in grade 2 and the other 73 were studying in grade 3 in three different junior high-school in Ardakan, Yazd, Iran. In each grade, 3 classes were assigned into 2 experimental groups of TE and IP in contrast to TI as the control group. The subjects of the study received 20 sessions of treatment on different types of instruction. Three sets of tests (Pre-test, Immediate post-test and Delayed post-test) were prepared to determine the effects of the different types of treatment on the subjects in different groups. Paired-sample T-Test and one-way ANOVA were employed as the statistical tests to analyze the data. The findings of the study revealed differences between the performances of three groups in each grade in terms of the subjects’ accurate use of the selected grammatical points. The results demonstrated that although both treatments (TE & IP) were more effective than Traditional Instruction, TE and IP were not meaningfully different.The implications of the study for teaching could clearly be for the teachers who wanted to help their students to improve their level of grammatical accuracy, through these different ways of grammar instruction.