مشخصات پژوهش

The present study attempted to measure noticing by means of note-taking to explore the effect of spontaneous focus on form on enhancing writing skill of Iranian EFL learners. Through purposive sampling 43 students (19 male and 24 female) from a Language Institute in Malekan, East Azerbaijan Province, Iran were recruited as participants. Students’ performance in narrative writing tasks was collected on three different occasions of pre-test, post-test, and delayed post test. The rationale behind this design was that the durability of learning in a writing module can be better determined if the students are able to integrate noticed features into their writing long after the noticing. The participants indicated their noticing of linguistic problems through note-taking during the writing task which was followed by exposure to two models and two revisions of their original writing once immediately and the other time two months later. The findings indicated an important noticing function of output. While composing a story, the participants, noticed their respective linguistic agendas (holes), found solutions in the models autonomously, and incorporated them in subsequent revisions (post-test and delayed post-test). In particular, lexical and grammatical features of the models that were related to the problems noticed by the participants through output were incorporated at a higher rate and were also retained longer than unrelated features (delayed post-test). It is argued that the act of note-taking has allowed the participants to engage in metalinguistic reflection and thereby enhanced the entire learning process. Thus, the output had a positive domino effect on learning. This suggests a constructive role for the output in both helping learners to identify the linguistic features they need and facilitating subsequent learning of these features.