The Impact of Online Teaching on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’Prepositions Awareness

Preposition is considered linguistically as one of the grammatical categories in Chomskyan literature playing its syntactic role in linking words in phrases and sentences. Pedagogically different types of prepositions in textbooks and educational contexts should be taught and learned accurately and properly both in traditional instruction and online teaching. Here, this study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of online instruction on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners' prepositions awareness. For these purposes ۸۰ learners of English at Shahid Hemmat language institute in the city of Qom participated in this study. Having being homogenized by an OPT test, ۶۰ learners were selected and they were randomly divided into two groups, control and experimental. Then both groups sat for a pre-test, which was a test of prepositions knowledge. The purpose of this test was to measure the learner’s initial knowledge of prepositions. Six main prepositions including at, in, on, to, by and into and also some syntactic phrases including noun+ preposition, adjective + preposition, verb + preposition with their complements were taught through English Grammar in Use book for intermediate level written by Murphy(۲۰۰۴). One group received treatment based on online chat-based strategy, but the other group received no treatment. The treatment procedure took ۱۰ sessions. Finally at the end of the course both groups sat for the post test of prepositions awareness. Then the statistical analysis was run through ANCOVA. The study found out that learners' prepositions knowledge improves more when they are provided with online chat-based strategy.

Keywords:

preposition , EFL learners , prepositions awareness , online chat-based strategy , curriculum innovation