Abstract-A major concern in today's world of pedagogy in general and language teaching, in particular, is the application of computer-assisted learning to improve students' achievement. There has been a long time that in the classroom setting only the teacher's feedback in a traditional way has been used in teaching. Due to the fact that this kind of notion can be traced back to a traditional attitude toward feedback, we looked for a new alternative in order to bring some innovation in an educational environment, namely Grammarly Software feedback provision. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to explore the impact of feedback provision by Grammarly Software and teachers on learning passive structures by EFL learners. Through convenience sampling, 70 intermediate male and female EFL learners were selected, then they were randomly assigned to two main groups: the experimental and control group. A grammar pre-test, a post-test, and a delayed post-test were administrated to the participants in six sessions. The results of the data gathered from pre-test and posttest reveal that the effect of teacher on learning passive structure, in pre-test and post-test, were more than the effect of Grammarly Software on learning passive structure of the learners, and the effect of Grammarly Software on learning passive structure in delayed post-test scores was more than the effect of teacher on learning passive structure of learners. The results might have implications for language teachers, learners, and materials developers.
Research in multilingualism has shown that bilinguals have enhanced executive function (e.g., Donnelly et al. in Proceedings of the 37th annual conference of the cognitive science society 2015; Green in Bilingualism Lang Cognit 1(02):67-81, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728998000133 ); however, this with many other areas in multilingualism have been questioned like their non-verbal reasoning or their metacognitive ability. This study attempts to explore learning more than one languages in the field of metacognitive abilities. Three groups of monolinguals, bilinguals, and trilinguals were explored to examine the effect of language learning on enhancing or weakening accuracy and response time in metacognitive processing. Conducting dot discrimination task, we found that multilingualism might have some advantages in this field. As cognition and metacognitive abilities demonstrated no positive correlation in this study, we might conclude that executive functioning can not bring about higher order functioning for the individuals. Nevertheless, monolinguals did the task in the least period of time with the least accuracy. Trilinguals, on the contrary, could respond more accurately with an average speed. Accuracy, difficulty, and response time choice in metacognitive processing were discussed for each group. It is concluded that multilingualism might have different effects on higher-order decision making abilities.
One of the main problems that EFL learners come across is how to improve their paragraph writing skills. Projectbased learning (PBL) is simply defined as an instructional approach that contextualizes learning by presenting learners with problems to solve or products to develop (Moss and Van Duzer, 1998) emphasizing learning through student-centered, interdisciplinary, and integrated activities in real world situations (Solomon, 2003). The purpose of this study was to investigate the possible impact of PBL on comparison and contrast paragraph writing skills of Iranian EFL Learners. The participants in the current study were 36Iranian male EFL learners who were chosen from 60 students at language institutes. The participants were at the intermediate level in compliance with Oxford Placement Test (OPT), and selected according to a simple random sampling: the Experimental group (EG) and Comparison group (CG) with 18students in each group. A comparison and contrast paragraph writing pre-test was also administered to measure their writing skills. Then, after 10 weeks of PBL and instruction, a comparison and contrast paragraph writing post-test was administered. The scores were then analyzed using a comparison scoring module and a contrast scoring module developed by Soleimani et al. (2008).The results were submitted to t-test revealing that the students who were educated by PBL outperformed the students who were educated by the instruction based on student textbooks. The findings lend credence to the positive effects of PBL in enhancing students writing performance.
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