Mohammad Hajeb - Department of English Language Teaching and Literature, Payame NoorUniversity, I. R. of Iran
Mina Esmaeili - Ph.D Candidate in TEF, Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic AzadUniversity, I. R. of Iran

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of processing instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ immediate and delayed mastery of present perfect tense. 70 participants who were non-randomly selected out of 123 Intermediate EFL learners, taking English courses in a language institute in Tabriz-Iran, participated in this quasi-experimental study. All the participants were female with the age range of 18-26. The participants were randomly assigned into experimental group of processing instruction and traditional instruction. The PI treatment comprised structured input (SI) activities that tangled sentence-level interpretation and production tasks. Three parallel focused task were employed as pre-test and post-test and delayed post-test in this study. The results revealed that processing instruction group performed significantly better than traditional instruction group in both immediate and delayed post-test. Some pedagogical implications of the findings were presented. The results might be helpful in syllabus design and teaching methodology.

input processing, processing instruction, traditional instruction, grammar instruction