Human infants develop language remarkably rapidly and without overt instruction. We argue that the distinctive ontogenesis of child language arises from the interplay of three factors: domain-specific principles of language (Universal Grammar), external experience, and properties of non-linguistic domains of cognition including general learning mechanisms and principles of efficient computation...

This study involving 60 Japanese learners of English investigated the effects of various kinds of form-focused instruction on learners’ ability to comprehend and produce polite requests in English. Each treatment group received one of the following: (a) deductive instruction; (b) inductive instruction with problem-solving tasks; or (c) inductive instruction with structured input tasks. These ta...

This quasi-experimental study examined the effects of input-based, meaning-based output (MO) and traditional instruction (TI) on EFL learners’ grammar learning. To this end, 120 junior high school students were selected from 4 intact classes. Each class was assigned to an instructional condition, that is, textual enhancement (TE), input flood (IF), MO, and TI. Before the treatment, a multiple-c...

Abstract This study aimed to shed light on young Iranian EFL students’ oral proficiency improvement through explicit instruction of formulaic sequences (FSs). This pretest-posttest quasi experimental study was conducted in a bilingual school in Shahrekord, Iran. Accordingly, based on ACTFL OPI test, two groups of low intermediate students with age range of 11 to 12 were chosen to be assigned as...

Abstract This study aimed to shed light on young Iranian EFL students’ oral proficiency improvement through explicit instruction of formulaic sequences (FSs). This pretest-posttest quasi experimental study was conducted in a bilingual school in Shahrekord, Iran. Accordingly, based on ACTFL OPI test, two groups of low intermediate students with age range of 11 to 12 were chosen to be assigned as...

This study explored the effect of input vs. collaborative output tasks on Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy and their willingness to communicate (WTC). In so doing, the study utilized 3 input (i.e., textual enhancement, processing instruction, and discourse) and 3 collaborative output (i.e., dictogloss, reconstruction cloze task, and jigsaw) tasks and compared their effects on 5 Englis...

The present study determines the effectiveness of inductive and deductive methods of grammar teaching on two groups of EFL students of a language institute in Shiraz, Iran. The researcher hypothesized that inductive method of teaching results in a higher learning outcome. Sixty students of the intermediate level were randomly assigned into two groups. First, a pretest was administered to both g...