The Impact of Textual Enhancement vs. Oral Enhancement on Learning English Language Grammar Hamidreza Fatemipour ELT Department, College of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch, Roudehen, Iran Somayeh Moharamzadeh ELT Department, College of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch, Roudehen, Iran Abstract—Among features of second language learning, grammar has been given a prominent role. Learning grammar is important and it can affect other aspects of language learning. Learning grammar cannot occur without noticing for EFL learners. Learners should become aware of the rules and internalize those rules. Also, learning grammar should happen in a meaningful context. There are two techniques which may provide the desired conditions. Those two techniques are Textual Enhancement and Oral Enhancement. The purpose of this study was to compare the results of applying these two techniques. As the study followed a non-probability sampling, 92 students were considered as the research subjects. After administering a test of homogeneity, the number reduced to 70. There were two experimental groups in the study. Participants in one group were exposed to textual enhancement, and the participants in another were exposed to oral enhancement. There was a test which became standardized through piloting. And it was administrated to the two groups. Detailed statistical analyses were conducted to analyze the obtained data. The results indicated that there was a statistical significant difference between the oral and textual enhancement groups ( t = -6.81, p < 0.05) regarding their performance on grammar achievement test. In other words, subjects in oral enhancement group outperformed the subjects in textual enhancement group. Index Terms—consciousness, noticing hypothesis, textual enhancement, oral enhancement I. INTRODUCTION In the history of language learning and teaching, there have been changes over teaching grammar. In grammar translation method, grammar rules were analyzed in details and those rules were applied to translate sentences and texts into students’ mother language and vice versa. In direct method, grammar was taught in an inductive way. Another example of teaching grammar was the way that audio-lingual method used in which grammar was taught inductively, and they practiced grammar components through different drills (Richards and Rodgers, 2001). Cowan (2008) states that, grammar is a set of rules that describes how words and group of words can be arranged to form sentences in a particular language. The grammar of English language involves all the rules that govern the formation of English sentences and that are exactly what learners of English want to know. In explicit grammar teaching, the rules are explained to learners, or the learners are directed to find the rules by looking at linguistic examples. On the other hand, as Doughly (2003) states, implicit teaching “makes no overt references to rules or forms” (p. 263). There are some arguments against the explicit teaching of grammar. Hall (2011) states that, knowing grammar does not mean that the learners can use the language in and out of the classroom. It is also stated that the time spent on explicitly teaching grammar can be spent on engaging in meaningful communication. The question is not whether to teach grammar or not, but according to Ellis (1997) how to choose a good way of teaching from among different pedagogical options and how to attract learners’ attention to different forms. One way is, input enhancement. Input enhancement relates to noticing. In order to help learners to notice the forms, there are techniques such as: textual enhancement (TE) and oral enhancement (OE) which can help learners notice the rules. According to Krashen’s (1981) input hypothesis, when learners are exposed to a more complex language than their current level of language proficiency, their knowledge of that language increases. Schmidt (2010) rejects the possibility of subliminal or unconscious acquisition of language features. He believes that even comprehensible input becomes intake when it can be used as a basis for development of the learners own second language. According to him, this happens when it is noticed. As Schmidt (1995) argues the notion of consciousness is useful and even necessary in second language acquisition. Developing a linguistic system needs linguistic data. To get this goal, the role of input enhancement becomes prominent. The role of input is to provide linguistic data. When learners receive input, they give the data to a linguistic ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 327-332, March 2015 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0602.12 © 2015 ACADEMY PUBLICATION