Teaching the Rule: A New Method in Teaching Verbal Forms to Iranian Students According to Linguistic Principles

Document Type : research article

Authors

Abstract

One of the main concerns of Iranian students who learn
English is the fact that they cannot learn the different English rules of
negative and interrogative tenses and hence suffer from numerous grammar rules.
The present study is based on the researchers' experiences, who have been
educated in Linguistics, in Teaching English to Persian students. They applied
a new teaching method (the Rule Teaching Method) unconciouslly and found that
there was an essential improvement in grammar learning by students. In the
present paper, the authors will introduce the Rule Teaching Method which is the
result of the utilization of linguistics principles. Using the findings of
linguists, instead of explaining each verbal form, in this method, a general
rule is expressed.. For testing this method, 40 students from two general
English classes were chosen. After the adjustment of their homogeneity, the
students of the first class were trained in the traditional method, in four
first sessions, while the other students were trained in the Rule Teaching
Method. Then a test prepared by the researchers (its content validity was
approved by related expertise) was given to both groups. The result was
statistically analysed and the data analysis showed a significant difference
between the score of the two groups. The results showed that the efficiency of
students who were trained in the Rule Teaching Method was higher than the other
students.

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