teaching the rule: a new method in teaching verbal forms to iranian students according to linguistic principles

one of the main concerns of iranian students who learnenglish is the fact that they cannot learn the different english rules ofnegative and interrogative tenses and hence suffer from numerous grammar rules.the present study is based on the researchers' experiences, who have beeneducated in linguistics, in teaching english to persian students. they applieda new teaching method (the rule teaching method) unconciouslly and found thatthere was an essential improvement in grammar learning by students. in thepresent paper, the authors will introduce the rule teaching method which is theresult of the utilization of linguistics principles. using the findings oflinguists, instead of explaining each verbal form, in this method, a generalrule is expressed.. for testing this method, 40 students from two generalenglish classes were chosen. after the adjustment of their homogeneity, thestudents of the first class were trained in the traditional method, in fourfirst sessions, while the other students were trained in the rule teachingmethod. then a test prepared by the researchers (its content validity wasapproved by related expertise) was given to both groups. the result wasstatistically analysed and the data analysis showed a significant differencebetween the score of the two groups. the results showed that the efficiency ofstudents who were trained in the rule teaching method was higher than the otherstudents.