Task Repetition and Noticing as a Route to Semester-long Destabilization: A Crosssectional Study of Iranian EFL Learners’ Oral Output

Tackling learners’ erroneous oral output has always been a substantial issue for both language teachers and researchers. Taking Swain’s output hypothesis and Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis into account, this study aims at investigating the effect of task- initiated noticing along with task repetition sessions as a route to destabilization of learner errors. The participants of the study were thirty two Iranian upper-intermediate learners. The participants were divided into two groups, an experimental and a control group. Both groups’ voices were recorded while delivering a prepared speech. The participants in experimental group were given the recorded presentation to be transcribed and compared with the original text they used while the control group didn’t receive feedback of any kind. The experimental group submitted a draft to their teacher who checked the papers and later asked them to prepare themselves for another prepared speech in the future. There was a pre-test, a treatment and a post-test. The comparison of the erroneous utterances in both groups lent support to the effectiveness of task repetition and noticing on destabilization of learners’ oral output.