Shabnam Mokhtarnia - Alborz University, Ziba Shahr, Qazvin
Mohsen Fathi - Alborz University, Ziba Shahr, Qazvin

The aim of the study was to investigate whether different textual enhancement devices had significant impact on the acquisition of English conditional sentences for Iranian EFL students. Participants were 75 students who were randomly assigned to four experimental groups, each being required to read one of the four possible versions of the same text on conditional sentences with different textual enhancement types (i.e., italicizing, boldfacing, underlining and highlighting) and one control group.The results of the Kruskal-Wallis Test, performed on the posttests indicated that there was a statistically significant difference among the participants with the Bold and Highlighted groups recording the highest median score.The results of the follow-up Mann-Whitney U tests also revealed that there were significant differences between Control and Bold; Control and Underlined; Control and Highlighted; and Bold and Italicized groups. The observed effect size values indicated medium effect size for Control/Bold (r = .41), and Control/Highlighted groups (r = .36) and small effect size for Control/Underlined ( r = .28) and Bold/Italicized (r = .28) groups.

textual enhancement devices, acquisition of English conditional structures