Nonverbal Prompts: A Remedy for Speaking Grammatical Inaccuracy

Journal of English Language Studies

مقاله 2، دوره 1، شماره 1، آذر 2009، صفحه 23-43   

نویسندگان

Arshya Keyvanfar¹؛ Fatemeh Azimi²

¹Assistant Professor of Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch

²MA in TEFL from Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch

چکیده

This study investigated the impact of nonverbal prompts on the speaking grammatical accuracy of Iranian male and female EFL learners. To this end, 80 EFL learners who were students of the intermediate level of a language school in Tehran and were randomly assigned to two experimental and two control groups took part in this study. The four groups were statistically compared in terms of their general language proficiency level and also speaking skill, indicating that they were eligible for this study. Two control groups of male and female participants received recasts and two experimental groups of male and female participants received nonverbal prompts in the form of body language and facial expressions. The results showed that using nonverbal prompts did significantly improve the speaking grammatical accuracy of the two experimental groups of male and female participants. Furthermore, female learners receiving nonverbal prompts outperformed their male counterparts. To investigate the degree of the impact of nonverbal prompts on male and female learners, the researchers conducted two regression analyses which revealed that male learners benefited more the experimental condition than the female learners. Finally, this study showed that the speaking improvement of female learners, unlike that of male learners, is not influenced by the type of feedback they receive during instruction.

کلیدواژه‌ها

nonverbal prompts؛ Corrective feedback؛ recasts؛ speaking grammatical accuracy