impact of ffi instructional techniques on the acquisition of english articles in iranian intermediate efl learners

The present study was aimed at investigating the differential effects of three types of form-focused instruction (ffi) procedures on the learning of english articles in iranian intermediate efl learners. to do so, 90 intermediate undergraduate students at islamic azad university, isfahan, iran, were selected to participate in the study. they were assigned to three experimental groups, namely input enhancement (ie), metalinguistic explanations (me), and information structure (is). textual input enhancement was employed to instruct the participants in the ie group, and two popular english grammar books, namely ‘essential grammar in use’ (murphy, 1998) and ‘oxford practice grammar’ (eastwood, 1999), constituted the instructional material in the me group. the third group was instructed on the effect of given and new information on the choice of appropriate article in english sentences. the data collected through the pre-test-post-test design underwent paired-samples t-test and one-way ancova for statistical analysis. the results showed that the three groups of ie, me, and is improved significantly from pre-test to post-test. however, on the post-test, the is learners significantly outperformed the me learners, who were in turn found to be meaningfully higher than their counterparts in the ie group. the findings of the study have important implications for the teaching of english articles to l2 learners.