Contrastive analysis

Although uninterpretable features are claimed to be an area of difficulty for EFL learners, they are still one of the less explored areas of research in the field of L2 pedagogy. The present study sought to investigate the impacts of two techniques, namely contrastive analysis and dictogloss on EFL learners’ mastery of resumptive pronouns, an uninterpretable feature absent in English relative clauses but present in most Persian ones. To this end, 77 elementary EFL learners with similar background in English were selected and assigned to three groups: one control and two experimental. Before and after the instruction the participants were administered a 50-item Grammaticality Judgment test and a 20-item translation test which had been developed and validated for use in this study. The results showed that all three groups had significant progression after the treatments, but the comparison among the groups indicated no statistically significant difference. This may suggest that L2 exposure had a more important role in the participants’ performance than the instruction type (contrastive analysis and dictogloss). The findings seem to support the importance of exposure to such L2 structures over time and that instruction cannot always accelerate acquisition.

This study aspires to examine the concept of ellipsis by comparing and contrasting English and Persian written texts. For this purpose, three Persian novels and three English ones were selected. These novels were analyzed carefully; they were compared and contrasted for types and amount of ellipsis used, through a Chi-square analysis. The results of the data analysis revealed that various types of ellipsis were used differently in these two languages. In other words, in the English corpus, nominal ellipsis was used more frequently than verbal ellipsis but in the Persian one, the use of verbal ellipsis was more frequent than nominal. Moreover, the results of this study lend some support to the idea of the universality of ellipsis, in that, all subtypes of ellipsis were used in these two languages although they were used more frequently in English than in Persian. This study might have implications for teachers, material developers, and researchers in the field of teaching English as a foreign language. In other words, teaching ellipsis directly to foreign language learners will improve the quality of their writing. Moreover, the results of the present study have obvious importance in increasing students' awareness of the way native speakers of English organize their writing.