On the Efficiency and Adequacy of L2 Instruction and Input

The present study was planned to investigate theefficiency of explicit teachi ng and adequacy of the l2learners' exposure to l2 input in academic contexts in iran.the case at hand was the acquisition of referential, quasi andexpletive subject pronouns, as ' hree different types ofobligatory subj ects in english. 96 iranian efl learners wereselected from two universities in isfahan. they werecategorized into three groups based on the amount 0 i' l2instruction/ input they had received. analys is of thepartic ipants' performance on a grarnrnaticality jud gment testand a translation task revealed that thei r knowledge ofenglish obl igatory subjects progressed after instruction andas the years of exposure increased. however, it did not reachan acceptable rate for learning. the problem was moreprominent for quasi subjects where they performed leastaccurately. these results indicate that the kind of instructionon obligatory subjects is not effic ient enough to affect thelearning process. it is concluded that certain properties of l2require more elaborate instructional techniques to achieve ahigher rate of effectiveness in our teaching efl setting