An Investigation to the Effects of Textual Enhancement on the Learning of English Past Tense in the Context of Iranian Learners

Textual Enhancement (TE) is a form of modifying visually those parts of a printed text which includes a targeted syntactic structure for the purpose of instruction. The aim is to bring the learner’s attention, while s/he is focusing on the meaning of a stretch of discourse, to the targeted structures and to how they are used. It is hoped that textual enhancement will promote the learner’s noticing of the form and will help them acquire or comprehend them. In the present study TE (bold-faced and italicized letters) was used for 53 male learners in the context of an Iranian language institute, to measure their learning of English past tense. Theoretical rationales for textual enhancement are reviewed, and the statistical discussions are treated next. Results show that both bold-faced and italicized letters increase learners’ learning of form, though bold-faced group displayed a better performance than the italicized group. Practical as well as theoretical implications are finally discussed.