The Effect of Teachers’ Metalanguage on Learners’ Noticing of Iranian EFL Learners across Proficiency Levels
Garmsar Azad University , Iran
ABSTRACT
Metalanguage that focused on linguistic competence and accuracy, has a crucial role in language teaching. However, by the advent of communicative language teaching (CLT), which greatly focused on fluency and communicative competence, metalanguage did not receive much attention. This study examined the effect of teachers’ metalanguage on learners’ noticing of grammatical points. This research was conducted on Iranian EFL learners of two levels of proficiency, elementary and intermediate, in an English language Institute in Iran. Two groups of experimental and control were chosen in each level of elementary and intermediate. In the group of experimental, metalanguage was used by the teachers to teach grammar points. However, in the group of control examples were used by the teachers to teach grammar points. For collecting data a noticing task test was administered to the both groups of experimental and control. The result indicated that the metalanguage had impacted the learners’ noticing of grammatical points.
KEYWORDS
Metalanguage, Teacher Talk, Noticing