Immediate and Long-term Effects of Form-Focused Instruction in the Acquisition of English Relative Clauses: Evidence from Turkish EFL Learners

Abstract

This article examines immediate and long-term effects of explicit formal instruction in the learning of relative clauses in English by Turkish native speakers. Forty-five 9-graders (aged 15-17) participated in the study. Data were collected by means of three different sentence combination tests and two different grammaticality judgment tests. Subjects were pretested prior to instruction on relative clauses, post-tested two days after, follow-up tested 6 weeks later and finally they were given a long-term test 6 months after instruction. Although the subjects’ performance seemed to improve considerably on their posttests, these results appeared to be only short term. Our findings support the view that though the immediate effects of form-focused instruction are positive, they do not appear to be long-lasting.

Keywords

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Immediate and Long-term Effects of Form-Focused Instruction in the Acquisition of English Relative Clauses: Evidence from Turkish EFL Learners

Abstract

This article examines immediate and long-term effects of explicit formal instruction in the learning of relative clauses in English by Turkish native speakers. Forty-five 9-graders (aged 15-17) participated in the study. Data were collected by means of three different sentence combination tests and two different grammaticality judgment tests. Subjects were pretested prior to instruction on relative clauses, post-tested two days after, follow-up tested 6 weeks later and finally they were given a long-term test 6 months after instruction. Although the subjects’ performance seemed to improve considerably on their posttests, these results appeared to be only short term. Our findings support the view that though the immediate effects of form-focused instruction are positive, they do not appear to be long-lasting. 

Keywords

• Form-focused instruction,explicit teaching,Turkish EFL learners,relative clauses,long-term effects of explicit teaching

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