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A Comparative Study of The Effect of Strategy Based Instruction and Task-Based Teaching on Developing Iranian EFL Learners’ Production of Apology and Request Speech Acts

Khalaji, Karim | 2014

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 46336 (31)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Languages and Linguistics Center
  6. Advisor(s): Salehi, Mohammad
  7. Abstract:
  8. The present study was conducted to explore the effect of strategy based instruction and task based teaching on EFL learners’ production of apology and request speech acts and also to investigate the relationship between grammatical competence and speech act performance. To this end, 35 intermediate English language students that comprised two intact classes in a language institute participated in this study. A standard English proficiency test for intermediate level and a discourse completion task (DCT) were used to measure students’ grammatical competence and speech act production. DCT was used at the beginning of the study to ensure that the two classes were homogenous in terms of apology and request speech acts production. Class1 (N=16) and class2 (N=19) were respectively instructed by task based approach and strategy based instruction for ten sessions. At the end the same DCT was administered again to measure the students’ apology and request speech acts production after being exposed to their respective teaching approaches. After the data analysis it was shown that there was not a significant difference between the two classes with regard to speech act production, but with comparing the means of two classes at the pretest and posttest, it can be noted that class1 which was instructed through task based approach had slightly better progress in comparison to class two. To examine the relationship between grammatical competence and speech act production, the scores of students in standard English proficiency test were correlated with their scores on DCT. The data analysis indicated that there was a weak but positive correlation between the two variables, which implies that learners’ pragmatic competence tend to slightly increase with the increase in their grammatical competence
  9. Keywords:
  10. English Language Teaching ; Strategy Based Instruction ; Task Based Teaching ; Apology Speech Acts ; Request Speech Acts ; Grammatical Competence ; Iranian EFL Learners

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