AN INVESTIGATION ON THE COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT CALL-BASED INSTRUCTION ON DEVELOPMENT OF SYNTACTIC KNOWLEDGE OF IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

The present study investigated the effects of implicit vs. explicit CALL-based instruction on development of syntactic knowledge of Iranian EFL learners. The participants of the study were 120 EFL learners selected based on their performance on a validated version of Nelson proficiency test. The participants went through the process of pretesting on grammatical accuracy, intervention, and post-testing. An independent t-test, one-way ANOVA as well as a two-way ANOVA were applied to analyze the collected data. The results of the study demonstrated that explicit group outperformed the implicit group. However, the blended group had the highest mean on the posttest of grammatical accuracy. This was followed by face-to-face and CALL only methods. Finally, it was reported that there was no significant difference between the CALL-based, face-to-face, and blended classes regarding the impact of implicit instruction on grammatical accuracy of the Iranian intermediate EFL learners. The implications of the study are also reported.