Focus on form in task-based language teaching (original) (raw)

2000, Language policy and pedagogy: Essays in honor of A. …

Given adequate opportunities, older children, adolescents and adults can and do learn much of an L2 grammar incidentally, while focusing on meaning, or communication. Research shows, however, that a focus on meaning alone (a) is insufficient to achieve full native-like competence, and (b) can be improved upon, in terms of both rate and ultimate attainment, by periodic attention to language as object. In classroom settings, this is best achieved not by a return to discrete-point grammar teaching, or what I call focus on forms, where classes spend most of their time working on isolated linguistic structures in a sequence predetermined externally by a syllabus designer or textbook writer. Rather, during an otherwise meaning-focused lesson, and using a variety of pedagogic procedures, learners' attention is briefly shifted to linguistic code features, in context, when students experience problems as they work on communicative tasks, i.e., in a sequence determined by their own internal syllabuses, current processing capacity, and learnability constraints. This is what I call focus on form. Focus on form is one of several methodological principles in Task-Based Language Teaching. Option 1: Focus on forms Option 1 is today considered the traditional approach, although it has not always been viewed that way. Course design starts with the language to be taught. The teacher or textbook writer divides the L2 into segments of various kinds (phonemes, words, collocations, morphemes, sentence patterns, notions, functions, tones, stress and intonation patterns, and so on), and presents these to the learner in models, initially one item at a time, in a sequence determined by (rather vague, usually intuitive) notions of frequency, valency, or (the all-purpose and questionbegging) "difficulty". Eventually, it is the learner's job to synthesize the parts for use in communication, which is why Wilkins (1976) called this the synthetic approach to syllabus design. It is not just the syllabus that is synthetic in this approach, however. Learners are typically encouraged to master each linguistic item in synthetic syllabuses one at a time, to native speaker levels using synthetic materials, methodology and pedagogy. Synthetic syllabi (lexical, structural, and notional-functional, for example), are accompanied by synthetic "methods" (Grammar Translation, ALM, AudioVisual Method, Silent Way, Noisy Method, TPR, etc.), and by the synthetic classroom devices and practices commonly associated with them (e.g., explicit