Abstract:
The purpose of the study was to activate the passive lexical knowledge through noticing and to investigate the effect of sentence writing as the post task of noticing activity on strengthening the effect of noticing. Forty-two Iranian female adult upper-intermediate English students of a state university in 2 homogenous groups participated in noticing the lexical items whose production were not as easy as their comprehension through highlighting them in a reading passage. Then,
the participants were involned in a four-week process of
massed/distributed sentence writing; every week the participants of one group wrote one sentence with one of the 16 noticed words each day during 4 consequent days, and the other group experienced this process once a week in which they wrote 4 sentences with the 4 noticed words without time interval. As the results indicated, presenting the post task was significantly effective in promoting the productive lexical knowledge of both groups. The interaction between the time factor and the methods of learning was significant. Also, the
distributed group outperformed the massed group, but not
significantly.
Machine summary:
Forty-two Iranian female adult upper-intermediate English students of a state university in 2 homogenous groups participated in noticing the lexical items whose production were not as easy as their comprehension through highlighting them in a reading passage.
com Introduction Language learning is considered a goal for all EFL learners and in order to be a successful learner, noticing is essential (Schmidt & Forta, 1986, as cited in Lynch, 2001).
218) which consisted of the noticed vocabulary items in the pilot study and was taken from a passage from Acklam and Crace (2006) --Total English (Upper intermediate)-- was tailored by the researchers to investigate the participants’ productive lexical knowledge in the pre test and the two post tests (see Appendix).
Following assigning the participants to two groups of massed and distributed, a C-test was given as the pre test to the learners of this study to know about their productive lexical knowledge before the noticing phase (i.
Therefore, to see how the participants of each group of the massed/distributed improved in the post test/delayed post-test in comparison with the pre-test, the within-subject effect is provided in Table 3.
e. massed/distributed), it is worth stating that the retention of the learnt productive vocabulary items in the short term was more effective than that in the long term, and also the difference between the results of the two groups in each test was not significant; however, the interaction between the time and the methods of learning was significant.