The effect of focus on form instruction on intermediate EFL learners grammar learning in task-based language teaching (original) (raw)
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Teaching Grammar to EFL Learners through Focusing on Form and Meaning
2017
The current study investigated the impacts of focus on form and focus on meaning on the learning of Wh-questions among senior high schools in Abadan, Iran. The participants were 60 male students who were selected among 100 learners non-randomly. They were studying English at a senior high school. They were aged between 15 and 17. In order to have homogeneous groups, the learners were given a grammatical test to determine their proficiency level. The teacher- made Wh-questions test based on the book one of high school was given to them as the pre-test. Then, they were assigned into two equal groups of experimental and control groups. The experimental group received instruction on focus on form and meaning but the control group was taught in the traditional way of teaching grammar including the use of examples and sentence exercises. Both groups received eight sessions of treatment, each 45 minutes with the same materials; and then they took a post-test at the end of the course. Data ...
This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of collaborative form-focused activities on grammar learning of elementary EFL learners. To this end, 58 adult male Iranian EFL learners at elementary level of proficiency in three classes of language institutes were chosen. They formed the three groups of the study. The grammar section of Cambridge Michigan Placement test was used to ensure the homogeneity of the groups. Then, a grammar pre-test was administered to all groups to ensure that the participants were unfamiliar with the target grammatical items (irregular past tense of the verbs). At this stage, the treatment started and while one experimental group received collaborative planned form-focused activities, the other experimental group received collaborative incidental form-focused activities. The control group underwent regular classroom patterns and methods. After the treatment sessions, all the groups took a grammar post-test and their knowledge of the target irregular past tense was checked. Finally, SPSS software was used to run t-test. The results revealed that there was a significant difference between the three groups regarding grammar learning, and that the group who experienced collaborative planned form-focused activities outperformed the other two groups. Introduction By the introduction of communicative language teaching (CLT) into the field of language teaching in the 1970s and 1980s, formal teaching of grammar reduced. Mitchell (2000, p. 285) underscored that "based on the CLT approach, explicit grammar teaching was considered as an inefficient tool for developing communication skills". Because CLT is a learner-centered approach, the learners have the opportunity to participate in meaningful interactions in order to respond to communicative needs (Canale & Swain, 1980; Savignon,1991). Therefore, the learners' grammar needs are determined based on their performance on fluency activities (Brumfit, 1979). Over the years, it was shown that CLT has been successful in developing learners' fluency (Nunan, 1989) and has had a positive impact on learners' motivation and language use. Nonetheless, there is still one important concern regarding the grammatical competence of learners who were taught through CLT approach. It was claimed that such learners gain low levels of grammatical accuracy. The reason was that by focusing on the negotiation of meaning, the issue of form was overlooked. The purpose of the present study was to investigate two related issues. First, it attempted to identify the impact of collaborative form-focused activities on EFL leaners' learning of irregular past tense verbs. Second, it tried to compare the
Teaching Grammar through Task-Based Language Teaching to Young EFL Learners
The present study investigates the effects of Task-Based Language Teaching on students' grammar knowledge in the field of teaching grammar. It has been studied with 32 students from 8 th grade during a two-and-a-half-month process. Throughout this process, students firstly are applied a pre-test to examine their level and to confirm whether there is homogeneity between experimental and control groups. The findings on the pre-test results of the students do not yield meaningful results; and the study, especially the instruction process of grammatical structures launches. At the end of the instruction process, a post-test is applied to students to evaluate whether the progress between pre and post-test results are meaningful or not. TBLT raises significantly the grammar knowledge of the experimental students. Task-Based Language Teaching in teaching grammar yields meaningful results compared to traditional language teaching method in this study.
THE EFFECTS OF FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION ON LOWER-INTERMEDIATE EFL IRANIAN LEARNERS’ GRAMMAR LEARNING
One of the most controversial questions raised by classroom second language acquisition (SLA) researchers is whether and how to include grammar in second language (L 2 ) classrooms. This study tried to investigate how the form-focused instruction affects lower-intermediate EFL Iranian learners’ grammar learning. Based on an experimental data collection and analysis, the study followed the pre-test and post-test design performed on 45 female participants at the pre-intermediate level. The pre-test was administered at the beginning of the course; then, the researcher divided the participants into two groups: experimental (FFI) and control group (traditional method). The researcher also used an observation checklist to ascertain if the teacher used the related items in classes. Afterwards, the researcher provided the frequency of observation of teachers’ operations which showed differences between the FFI and the traditional instruction. After observing the teaching sessions, the researchers administered the same test as a post-test to both groups. . The data were analyzed using independent t-test and paired t-test.
Realization of preemptive focus on form in the English-language teaching context
Open Linguistics, 2020
While reactive focus on form (FonF) has been addressed extensively in the literature, preemptive FonF has not attracted the attention it deserves. To fill in part of this gap in the English-language teaching (ELT) context, the present study was conducted to examine the occurrence of preemptive focus on form episodes (FFEs) in the classes of two male and two female English-language teachers. Additionally, it aimed to explore the frequency of student-initiated and teacher-initiated FFEs as well as the uptake and no uptake moves in four classes. To address these issues, all cases of preemptive FFEs were identified in 6 h of instruction obtained from videotaping of four classes. Results confirmed that preemptive FonF does occur in the process of meaning-focused communication and that they are used by male and female teachers almost equally to deal with linguistic difficulties. The findings further showed that student-initiated and teacher-initiated FFEs occurred almost equally in four c...
PROCEEDING AISELT (Annual International Seminar on English Language Teaching), 2018
The objective of this research is to find out the effect of cognitive and focus on form instruction toward vocational high school EFL learners' achievement of grammar in vocational school at SMKN 3 Kota Serang. The researcher used quantitative research implementing the true experimental design as research method. There were two groups used in this research, the mainly; the experimental and control group. Sample of this research is students of SMKN 3 Kota Serang, 39 students selected for experimental group, and 38 students selected for control group. The research found that there is significant influence of cognitive and focus on form instruction toward vocational high school EFL learners' achievement of grammar, it was indicated by the value of t-test higher than the value of t-table (0.950 > 0.000) at the level of significant of α 0.05 and the degree of freedom of 75. It means that the hypothesis was accepted. From those findings, it can be concluded that the use of cognitive and focus on form instruction is effective to influence learners' achievement of grammar in vocational school at SMKN 3 Kota Serang. All these suggest that the use of cognitive and focus on form instruction in the class of English is highly encouraged.
The Impact of Focus on Form Instruction on Second Language Vocabulary and Grammar Learning
Journal of Advances in English Language Teaching, 2013
The teaching of vocabulary and grammar has long been an area of dispute in the field of second language acquisition (Brown, 2001). This study investigated the effect of focus on form instruction on vocabulary learning through the medium of visually enhanced reading texts. Sixty four Intermediate EFL learners were assigned to two experimental groups including a vocabulary and grammar group. After taking a pretest based on the enhanced forms, the learners received ten reading texts with visually enhanced lexical items for the vocabulary group and grammatical structures for the grammar group. In order to investigate the effect of visual enhancement of forms on participants' vocabulary learning, they took a posttest based on the enhanced forms. Paired sample t-test and ANOVA were used for the analysis of the data gathered from the learners' performance on the pretest and the posttest. The results revealed positive effects of visual enhancement of forms on learning vocabulary and grammar. This research can provide L2 teachers and syllabus designers with useful information about the effectiveness of visual input enhancement as a technique for vocabulary and grammar learning.
Incidental grammar acquisition involves the learners “picking-up” a grammatical feature while their primary focus is on some other aspect of language – either message content or some other language feature that is taught directly. This article reports a study of children’s incidental grammar acquisition of two grammatical features––plural -s and copula be––in two different types of instruction––focus on form (FonF) and focus on forms (FonFs). The two grammatical features were not directly taught but opportunities for learning them occurred in the classroom interactions. Thirty young, beginner Japanese learners were divided into two groups (FonF and FonFs) and received nine repeated lessons over five weeks. The study examined the learners’ acquisition of the two structures as measured by tests and sought explanations for the results in terms of the differences in the interactions that arose in the two instructional contexts and, in particular, the opportunities for attending to the two grammatical features in these interactions. The children in the FonF classroom demonstrated acquisition of plural -s but not of copula be. Neither structure was acquired by the children in the FonFs classroom. Analysis of the classroom interactions showed that there was a functional need to attend to plural-s (but not copula be) only in the FonF classroom.
Form-Focused Instruction in Communicative Language Teaching: Implications for Grammar Textbooks
TESL Canada Journal, 2000
This article examines a number of adult ESL grammar textbooks via an author designed checklist to analyze how well they incorporate the findings from research in communicative language teaching (CLT) and in form1ocused instruction (FFI). It concludes that although a few textbooks incorporate some of the research findings in CLT and FFI, they are not necessarily those chosen by the teaching institutions.