The effect of instruction of lexical inferencing strategies on Iranian EFL learners production of English proverbs

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of four different forms of strategy instruction on proverb production. To fulfill the purpose of this study, 120 female students were selected and randomly assigned to four lexical inferencing strategies groups including form-focused, monitoring, evaluating, and meaning-focused strategies and a control group. After 12 sessions of treatment, a posttest was administered to the five groups. The collected data were analyzed using a one-way ANOVA procedure. The results showed that three of the experimental groups significantly outperformed the control group. Moreover, the meaning-focused group performed significantly better than the evaluating, monitoring, and form-focused groups. The findings suggested that meaning-focused strategy can be used as an effective instructional tool to help learners enhance their production of English proverb. These findings may have implications for the teaching and learning of English proverbs.