摘要
The issue of whether online teaching could replace traditional classroom(TC)teaching has attracted the attention of researchers in the applied linguistics literature.The current study attempted to shed light on this proposition by testing it on the difficult linguistic target of conditional if-clauses in English.The difficulty of these clauses stems from the fact that different tenses are used to express meanings that are sometimes not related to the tense used.The study recruited 49 participants,who were divided into two groups(23 in the online group,26 in the TC teaching group)and given a multiple-choice task containing 20 items.The study adopted a longitudinal research design(pretest and posttest).Each group was pretested before receiving just one two-hour treatment session.Then both groups were posttested.The results showed that both groups struggled with the second and third types of conditionals more than the zero and first types.The TC teaching group improved in the posttest in all types of conditionals.The online group improved in only two types of conditionals(zero and first).The TC teaching group outperformed the online group in the second and third conditionals.The findings indicate that classroom learning is superior to online learning and that,depending on their type,some conditionals in English are more difficult to learn than others.
