The effect of Input Enhancement and Noticing the Gap on recognition of Conjunctions among Iranian EFL Learners

One of the productive skills which both learners and instructors do not pay so much attention to itis writing. Meanwhile, the crucial need for the coherence and cohesion of the speech on onehand, and the prominence of writing cohesively on the other, led the present researchers to usethe teaching techniques, input enhancement and noticing the gap, to teach the participants how touse conjunctions appropriately in their pieces of writing on both sentence and text levels. To doso, the researcher provided pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest with a two-week interval onsentence and text-based samples to evaluate the participants recognition abilities. A total of 74male EFL learners aged 19 to 23 studying English in Khatam-ol-Anbia University participated inthis study in two experimental groups and one control group. In order to analyze the dataobtained, a between-within the groups ANOVA was used. The results showed that noticing thegap technique was far more effective than the technique of input enhancement in recognizingconjunctions. However, the input enhancement technique was very fruitful compared to theresults of the control group.

Keywords:

Cohesion , Coherence , Conjunctions , Input enhancement , Noticing the gap