A syntactic-based approach to the perception and production of English verbs' argument structures by Iranian EFL learners

Foreign language learners face learnability problems in the perception and production of English verbs' argument structures manifested by different verbs. The purpose of this study was to investigate the problems Iranian learners encounter when perceiving and producing English verbs' argument structures. A number of 75 students whose major was English literature and translation took part in this study. To answer the research questions, first, an Oxford Placement Test was administered to obtain three different proficiency levels including elementary, lower intermediate, and upper-intermediate. Then, one week after the proficiency test, a translation test was used to assess the learners' production of English verbs' argument structures. Finally, a Grammaticality Judgment test was conducted one week after the translation test to estimate the learners' perception of English verbs' argument structures. The data then were analyzed using descriptive statistics, One-way ANOVA, and also a Paired-samples t-test. The obtained data showed that students with different proficiency levels produced and perceived English verbs' argument structure differently and also they faced problems in producing ditransitive and perceiving transitive verbs.