the effect of storytelling and translation techniques on learning proverbs among female iranian efl online learners

Teaching proverbs is one of the important, while problematic issues in etl. it has been a long tradition to teach proverbs through traditional and conventional ways but they are still considered demanding. hence, new ways of teaching proverbs are investigated. the current study explored the effect of storytelling and translation techniques on learning proverbs among female iranian efl learners in online classes, which came into vogue after corona pandemic, and the attitudes of the learners toward proverb learning. in order to do these, participants who were 30 female high school students studying in iranshahr whose homogeneity as pre-intermediate learners was checked via nelson proficiency test were assigned to two groups: storytelling group, and translation group; each group containing 15 students. treatment lasted seven sessions and it included 50 english proverbs. in each session, the participants of two experimental groups were engaged in learning seven english proverbs. translation group were presented with l1 equivalents of the proverbs; storytelling group were presented with a funny story about each proverb. an attitude questionnaire and a test of proverbs were applied prior and after the treatment. the results of paired t-test indicated that both storytelling technique and translation were effective in improving learners' knowledge of l2 proverbs. the results of further t-test depicted that there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups in posttest. in addition, it was shown that participants' attitudes toward learning proverbs were improved post-interventionally using these two techniques. these findings have implications for material developers, l2 instructors, and l2 learners about the importance of use of l2 proverbs.