mathematical, and verbal types of intelligence seem to be more readily inclined to learn and adopt grammar explicitly. Our capacity to acquire new languages declines as we age. As a result, this also means that explicit grammar instruction becomes more relevant as we get older as well. “Formal” language learning seems to be a better approach for adult learners (Longhurst, 2013). To test the third hypothesis: There is no significant difference between the two mentioned instructional methods as far as their effect on learning conditional sentences by Iranian intermediate EFL
learners is concerned, one-way between groups ANOVA was conducted twice: once for the
comparison of the grammar scores of the three groups at the beginning of the study and comparing these groups’ grammar scores after the experiment was conducted. The analysis of the results uncovered that the three groups significantly differed in terms of their knowledge of grammar at the end of the experiment, which might be attributable to the treatments they were exposed to. To precisely understand about the differences Pairwise comparisons of these groups in the LSD post hoc test was made. Finally, the results demonstrated that the two experimental groups had better performances than the CG, and among the experimental groups, task-based teaching group benefited more than the explicit instruction group from its treatment.
As it was mentioned, task-based language teaching is an approach which offers students materials which they have to actively engage in order to achieve a goal or complete a task (Skehan, 1998). Much like regular tasks that people perform everyday such as making the tea, writing an essay, talking to someone on the phone, TBLT seeks to develop students’ interlanguage through providing a task and then using language to solve it. TBLT provides favorite situations for developing the second language (Rahimpour, 1995, 1999; Robinson, 1995). While carrying out communicative tasks, learners are said to receive comprehensible input and modified output, processes believed central to second language acquisition and which ultimately lead to the development of both linguistic and communicative competence (Doughty & Williams, 1998).
7. Conclusion
Undoubtedly, teaching grammatical structures is one significant goal of all language teaching programs. It is believed that L2 learners’ communicative competence involves grammatical competence as one essential component. By the emergence of the communicative language teaching approach in the early 1980s and much stress on learners’ communicative abilities over the last two decades, the term Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) came into widespread use in the field of Second Language. Therefore, an attempt was made in this study to compare task- based teaching of conditionals as the target structure with explicit instruction of them to determine the degree of effectiveness of these two approaches to teaching grammar.
After performing the experiments and doing the necessary statistical an analysis it was found that: there was a statistically significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the learners in the task-based group, and that the learners in this group had improved significantly owing to the treatment they experienced. In addition, explicit group learners improved significantly from pretest to posttest, and also the learners in the two experimental groups obtained significantly better results than the control group learners. Additionally, it was shown that task-based instruction was significantly more effective than explicit instruction when it came to teaching/learning conditional sentences type 2.
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