This study has aimed to compare the effects of two types of form-focused instruction, i.e. de-contextualized focus-on-forms instruction versus meaning-centered contextualized focus-on-form instruction, on the development of grammatical knowledge of Iranian high-school students. Two groups of male high-school first graders participated in this study.  One group was taught through de-contextualiz...

The purpose of a learner is to make changes in a performance system to do similar tasks more effectively the next time. The meaning of “more effectively” can be only asserted in the context of the learner’s goals. Three types of learning goals can be distinguished in the context of planning systems: domain goals, planning efficiency goals, and plan efficiency or plan quality goals. Most work to...

What information is available from a brief glance at a novel scene? Although previous efforts to answer this question have focused on scene categorization or object detection, real-world scenes contain a wealth of information whose perceptual availability has yet to be explored. We compared image exposure thresholds in several tasks involving basic-level categorization or global- property class...

It has been suggested that acronyms like BBC are processed like real words. This claim has been based on improved performance with acronyms in the Reicher-Wheeler task, the letter string matching task, the visual feature integration task, and the N400 component in event-related potential (ERP) studies. Unfortunately, in all these tasks performance on acronyms resembled performance on pseudoword...

This paper discusses the effectiveness of using two task-types, dictogloss and opinion-gap tasks, in focus-on-form lessons to elicit language-related episodes (LREs) and produce modified output. The participants were 40 Form 6 students in a Malaysian secondary school in two intact classes. One group was taught using opinion-gap tasks and the other using dictogloss tasks. Results show that almos...

This study aimed to investigate the relative effectiveness of consciousness-raising tasks and structure-based production tasks in comparison with the traditional teaching in learning comparative and superlative forms, following a task-based approach to teaching English grammar. To this end, from among 82 female elementary-level high school students having taken a Solutions Placement Test (2010)...