Samaneh Gholampour & Donya Mehrabi
Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran
Teaching grammar has been a debatable issue over the past few decades. According to Al- Kharrat (2002), grammar is taught in both deductive and inductive ways. Deductive ways of teaching English refers to teaching the grammatical rules and learners should apply the rules in different sentences. However, inductive teaching refers to implicit teaching. Recently, teachers tend to utilize a mix of both methods to teach grammar, and that is called Guided Discovery Learning. According to Saumell (2012) “Guided Discovery is a modified inductive approach in which there is exposure to language first, followed by the use of inference, and finally an explicit focus on rules and practice” (p. 2). As teaching grammar is an essential part of learning a language and most of Iranian EFL learners have difficulty with acquiring and utilizing the correct grammatical forms of tenses in their utterances, the present study focused on investigating the effect of guided discovery learning on acquisition of present progressive of Iranian high school Learners. To this end, 120 students were selected and homogenized using a KET. The participants were divided into two groups of experimental and control group. Then, a pretest of grammar containing 50 items in the form of multiple choice and fill the blanks was administered to both groups. Then, during five sessions of treatments, the learners in experimental group were provided with texts enriched with examples of present progressive tense. The learners were required to work in pairs and find the target information without any help from teacher. In control group, present progressive tense was taught explicitly. Finally the posttest of grammar was administered and the results of the data analysis revealed that learners in experimental group significantly outperformed their counterparts in control group. The result of this study is of high significance for language teachers as well as materials developers and curriculum designers.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Third International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 31 January-1February 2019 , Ahwaz.
