Proceedings of the 1st Arts & Humanities Conference, Venice

METALANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR LEARNING OF IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

ANITA ROSHAN

Abstract:

Metalanguage did not receive a lot of attention in communicative language teaching (CLT), which greatly focused on fluency and communicative competence. Metalanguage has remained an untouched area in second language studies. This research was conducted on Iranian EFL learners in Tehran Institute of Technology (The West Branch) to examine the effect of teachers’ metalanguage on learners’ learning of grammatical points across proficiency levels. In each level of elementary and intermediate, two groups were chosen, an experimental and a control group. In the experimental group, the teachers used metalanguage to teach grammar points. However, in control group the teachers used examples to teach grammar points. A questionnaire was administered to the two groups to collect data. The result indicated that metalanguage had impacted on the learners’ learning of grammatical points. The effect was more obvious with regard to the learning of grammatical points where the intermediate learners remarkably did better than the elementary ones.

Keywords: Metalanguage, Metalinguistic terminology, Teacher Talk, Grammar Learning, Interaction

DOI: 10.20472/AHC.2016.001.015

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