A Systematic Self Review of EFL Grammar Studies (2000–2025): Teaching, Technologies, and Learning Outcomes

Abstract

This systematic review (SR) synthesizes 28 empirical studies conducted by the author between 2000 and 2025 on the teaching, learning, and assessment of English grammar among Saudi EFL college students. The corpus comprises seven experimental and quasi experimental studies evaluating the effectiveness of instructional approaches, online platforms, and learning environments; six model building studies proposing pedagogical frameworks for using podcasts, online tasks, and iRubrics; and fifteen analytical studies documenting learners’ grammatical weaknesses based on test responses and error corpora collected from assignments and projects. The studies were organized into four thematic clusters: teaching grammar with technology; grammar assessment and testing; grammar learning outcomes with three sub-clusters (morphological problems, grammatical difficulties in specialized contexts, and translation problems of grammatical structures); and factors influencing grammar learning outcomes. Across the four clusters, the findings reveal a coherent developmental trajectory in how Saudi EFL learners acquire, process, and apply grammatical knowledge under varying instructional, technological, and contextual conditions. Technology enhanced grammar instruction, whether through LMS platforms, online tasks, Elluminate sessions, or mind mapping, yielded significant gains when the tools were simple with an interactive learning community. Linguistically, students exhibited morphological weaknesses, particularly in plural formation and noun  and adjective forming suffixes. Genre based studies showed difficulties in identifying syntactic features in advertisements, legal texts, and news discourse, while translation focused studies revealed challenges with collocations, pronouns, particles, SVO order, and agreement, indicating that grammatical difficulties extend beyond isolated forms to broader syntactic and discourse level processing. Findings from the fourth cluster demonstrate that pedagogical, technological, and socio cultural factors significantly shape grammar learning outcomes. Instructor qualifications, assessment practices, and instructional design influenced learners’ grammatical accuracy; simple LMS designs (as Nicenet) facilitated participation, whereas platforms with complex design, as Moodle and WebCT, hindered engagement; and gender segregated online collaboration introduced socio cultural constraints that affected interaction and learning. Moreover, the content and focus of grammar instruction should vary depending on whether it targets general academic purposes or professional/occupational needs. This SR fills a gap in the literature by offering an integrated thematic synthesis that brings together technology mediated instruction, assessment practices, morphological and syntactic difficulties, translation related errors, and contextual factors affecting grammar learning within a unified analytical framework.