130 CHAPTER 8 OVERALL RESULTS To summarize, the combined studies reported in this dissertation convincingly show that the DUB approach can prepare students adequately for their nal exams in terms of reading and writing skills: SB and DUB-taught students score equally well on their nal reading and writing exams, but the DUB students outperformed their SB-taught peers in several domains: sentence complexity, uency, and chunk coverage. Moreover, as expected, the DUB students outscored the SB students in both speaking and listening. In other words, the DUB program enabled learners to pass their exams while also allowing them to develop true communicative competence in the target foreign language. is contradicts the claim that the development of writing skills, and accuracy in particular, necessitates explicit instruction on grammar, which was rst motivated by SLA research (Norris & Ortega, 2000; Spada & Tomita, 2010) and was soon widely adopted by L2 teachers. Apparently, an implicit approach to the teaching of grammar is as e ective as an explicit approach to develop writing skills a er six years. It has the added value that without time spent on explicit grammar, there is ample time to promote spoken uency skills. is di erence in e ectiveness, reported above, can be explained by further examining two major di erences between the programs which may be held responsible. One relates to the introduction of linguistic forms and cognitive competition and the other relates to the frequency of repetition, in turn leading to entrenchment. In the next section these two di erences will be discussed.
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