Impact of Consciousness-Raising Activities on Young English Language Learners’ Grammar Performance

Grammar Consciousness-Raising (GCR) is an approach to teaching of grammar which learners instead of being taught the given rules, experience language data. The data challenge them to rethink, restructure their existing mental grammar and construct an explicit rule to describe the grammatical feature which the data illustrate (Ellis, 2002). And also GCR approach encourages learners to pay attention to language form (Richards & Smidth, 2002). The present study aimed to consider the effectiveness of grammar consciousness-raising activities on the development of young EFL learners’ grammar performance and also to study the appropriateness of consciousness-raising for young learners. The participants were 60 young Iranian male and female pre-intermediate students with the age range of 11 to 16. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups. The Experimental group was exposed to grammar consciousness-raising activities based on three techniques of Recall, Reconstruction, and Bolding-Underlying while the control group was trained by deductive grammar teaching. A grammar test was administered to the participants before and after the treatment as pretest and posttest. And also by applying a questionnaire to the experimental group, the learners showed their attitude toward consciousness-raising. The results revealed that grammar consciousness-raising activities have a significant effect on the development of young learners’ grammar performance and consciousness-raising is suitable for young learners.