EFL Learners’’ Perception in First Language Use on Acquisition of Grammatical Explanations

This study investigated grammatical difficulty from the perspective of second language (L2) learners in relation to their overall L2 performance and knowledge. The design included the administration of a student questionnaire. The questionnaire was administered to 185 university-level Iranian EFL learners which explored learners’ perceptions of grammatical difficulty. The participants who completed the questionnaire met with the researcher individually to complete a grammatical difficulty ranking activity, grammar exercises and stimulated recalls, all of which aimed to further explore why the learners considered the selected features to be more (or less) difficult for them to learn. The questionnaire results indicated that, overall, the participants did not perceive the 5 target features to be difficult to learn. Notwithstanding, the ranking results of the questionnaire suggest that learners’ perceptions of grammatical difficulty are based on whether the rules to describe the formation of language features are easy or difficult to articulate

Keywords:

perceptions , grammatical difficulty , Iranian EFL learners , language features