Massed/Distributed Sentence Writing: Post Tasks of Noticing Activity

The purpose of the study was to activate the passive lexical knowledge through noticing and to investigate the effect of sentence writing as the post task of noticing activity on strengthening the effect of noticing. Forty-two Iranian female adult upper-intermediate English students of a state university in 2 homogenous groups participated in noticing the lexical items whose production were not as easy as their comprehension through highlighting them in a reading passage. Then, the participants were involved in a four-week process of massed/distributed sentence writing; every week the participants of one group wrote one sentencewith one of the 16 noticed wordseach day during 4 consequent days, and the other group experienced this process once a week in which they wrote 4 sentences with the 4 noticed words without time interval. As the results indicated, presenting the post task was significantly effective in promoting the productive lexical knowledge of both groups. The interaction between the time factor and the methods of learning was significant. Also, the distributed group outperformed the massed group, but not significantly.