Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Languages and Linguistics Center, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran
2 Department of English language & Literature, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran
Abstract
The acquisition of prepositions has been notoriously challenging for those who are learning English as a foreign language. Meanwhile, it has been suggested that applying extensive reading can be a beneficial approach since such instructional strategy draws learners’ attention to the target forms through incidental learning. The current study attempted to investigate the comparative effects of different extensive reading enhancement modalities on the incidental acquisition of simple prepositions. Sixty-six Iranian adolescent EFL students divided into three groups of digitally-enhanced extensive reading, print-enhanced extensive reading, and control were recruited. Over a 9-week period, the experimental groups participated in an engineered extensive reading program during the last thirty minutes of their classes (two sessions per week). They completed two graded readers from the Oxford Bookworms series and during each session, orally summarized four pages to encourage meaningful use of the target prepositions, thereby consolidating their contextualized exposure during reading. The control group received no such intervention. An immediate and a delayed post-test were administered following the intervention, revealing that the print-enhanced group outperformed the control group on both the immediate and delayed post-tests. However, the differences between the digitally-enhanced group and the other two groups did not turn out significant. The experiment showed that the physical medium of extensive reading can be a considerable variable for the incidental acquisition of prepositions as low-salience grammatical features, with findings indicating the superiority of print materials enhanced by strategic typography.
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