چكيده فارسي :
The present study examined how focused and unfocused tasks affect EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge. It employed a pretest and posttest design with three sessions of treatment. The focused and unfocused tasks were dictogloss and storytelling tasks, respectively and the target grammatical feature was (used to + bare infinitive). The participants were 21 Iranian intermediate EFL learners who were divided into three groups, each 7, and were assigned to three different instructional conditions. In the focused task group, the students engaged in a dictogloss task, which required them to reconstruct a text including the target feature that the instructor read to them slowly. In the unfocused task group, a number of pictures were shown to some of the students based on which they could tell a story to their partners who did not see the pictures using the aforementioned grammatical feature. Lastly, in the comparison group, the participants were taught through the traditional Presentation, Practice, and Production model. After conducting quantitative analysis, it was revealed that in terms of grammatical knowledge, subjects in focused task group and the comparison group outperformed the subjects in the unfocused task group significantly. In addition, there was no significant difference between subjects’ grammatical achievement in the focused task group and the comparison group. The findings of this study support the desirability of using focused tasks in second language grammar teaching, which integrates both interaction and planned form-focused instruction.
