On the Efficiency and Adequacy of L2 Instruction and Input

The present study was planned to investigate the efficiency of explicit teaching and adequacy of the L2 learners' exposure to L2 input in academic contexts in Iran. The case at hand was the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, as three different types of obligatory subjects in English. 96 Iranian EFL learners were selected from two universities in Isfahan. They were categorized into three groups based on the amount of L2 instruction/ input they had received. Analysis of the participants’ performance on a grammaticality judgment test and a translation task revealed that their knowledge of English obligatory subjects progressed after instruction and as the years of exposure increased. However, it did not reach an acceptable rate for learning. The problem was more prominent for quasi subjects where they performed least accurately. These results indicate that the kind of instruction on obligatory subjects is not efficient enough to affect the learning process. It is concluded that certain properties of L2 require more elaborate instructional techniques to achieve a higher rate of effectiveness in our teaching EFL setting